When people abuse the CC header field in e-mail
When people use the CC field for a long list of e-mail recipients of which I’m one, I usually send them back something like this note:
Hi. This is a boilerplate message that I send to people who send e-mail messages to me as a part of a CC to a large group of people. I would like to discourage you from using this particular approach to send a message to a large group of e-mail addresses. Here’s why:
A) If someone replies to the message, it would be very easy for them to reply to all of the recipients. Unless you intended to create a discussion about your message content that everyone participates in (which you probably didn’t if I’m sending you this), that can be a very unwanted effect. (Ask me about the time a non-profit I knew of almost got wiped off the Internet after everyone they sent mail to started replying to the whole list saying “TAKE ME OFF THIS LIST!” Whew!)B) You’ve now made public a list of all of the e-mail addresses you have in your contact list for this particular topic. In some cases, that can be very useful to someone who might want to contact all of us about something similar. The problem is, I may not want to get messages about “similar” topics from just anyone. If you have my address for contacting, hopefully I gave it to you willingly. But I didn’t necessarily give it to everyone else on your list, and now they have it.
If you want to send a message like this to a large group of people, there are better ways to do it:
1) Use “BCC.” BCC stands for “blind carbon copy,” and it’s intended for just this kind of mailing. When you put all of the addresses into the “BCC” field of your mail program, the resulting message they get will not show all of the recipients. Perfect!
2) Use mailing list software. There are special programs designed to manage mailings to long lists of people. They usually support fun features like archiving and subscription management that can be really useful these days. Ask your e-mail host or internet service provider if they offer mailing list services.
I hope this is useful. As you might imagine, I would ask that you NOT include me in future mailings where you CC a large group of people. If you’re able to switch to a more conventional method, then feel free to leave me on the list.
Thanks,
Chris
Anyone else have their own version of this response? Or thoughts on this particular kind of e-mail faux pas?
One Response to “When people abuse the CC header field in e-mail”
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August 12th, 2006 at 8:31 am
Additional thoughts on BCC:
In the mass mail situation you describe, are you implicitly suggesting using *only* BCC for *all* recipients?
That makes sense to me. It might be good to explicitly warn about mixing BCC recipients with TO and CC recipients.
If I recall correctly, BCC recipients still can reply to all other visible recipients. (Perhaps that behavior depends upon one’s mail program?)
In that case, the visible recipients (i.e. listed as TO and CC ) may receive a mysterious reply from an unexpected source, and wonder, “Hey, why is Mr. X replying to this message sent to me?” That can create some… interesting… office conversation.
When using BCC then, it might be helpful to note in the message that there are more recipients, and/or only use TO and CC for those few recipients who won’t be shocked by mysterious replies.
Cheers