I’m sure it’s happened to you before: someone you know sends out an email to everyone they know, someone hits reply all, this sets off a chain reaction and you start getting emails all over the place that you don’t even care about.
In the era of spam email, most people are fairly protective of their email address and don’t distribute it without a good reason. You wouldn’t give out your friends phone numbers or home addresses unless you had a very good reason to so why would you give out their email address?
Next time you want to send an email to multiple people who don’t know each other and don’t need to know each other, use blind carbon copy (BCC). Blind carbon copy is different from regular carbon copy because the recipients all get copies but no one sees anyone else’s email address.
Since you are required to have at least one address in the “to” field, put your own email address there. Put everyone else you want to send the email to in the BCC field.
The only time you should be putting multiple address in the “to” field are when the people already know each other and they might want to talk to each other directly about it. If I’m sending an email to my immediate family members I put them all in the “to” field. If it’s a work email and there are other coworkers involved on the item then all the email addresses go in the “to” or “cc” field. If your contacts do not know each other and have no reason to know each other then you should not be sharing their email addresses.
If I was sending a invitation for a party, I’d put everyone in the “bcc” field. My whole address book does not want or need a reply all from one guest to know if they’re coming or not.
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Great entry. I HATE those sorts of e-mail faux pas. I also hate when people accidently reply all on facebook messages. Honestly, I’m not a fan of receiving mass facebook messages either way. BUT as you said, I’m somewhat protective of my e-mail address and don’t wish to be hounded by just anyone. So thank you for addressing this issue. The beauty of BCC is not lost on me.
B
This is a great post. I think people need to learn when to use reply and when to use reply all as well.
thanks for the info!
So many people do not get it…thanks for this post. I forward neighborhood and police alerts to my neighbors and I use the BCC field. When I first volunteered, I was asked to remove the sender’s email address as well. Many people don’t think about that too when they forward an email…the forward trail is long…I try to remember to remove all email addresses when forwarding. About the family/friends email, sometimes I BCC to them too because the Reply Alls get to be too much. I have a large family.
PS I changed my twitter handle but when I comment on this site, it shows my old twitter handle…do you know how I can change it from juliebakes to thelittlekitchn? Thanks!
Great post! At work, I’m still coming to terms with ‘reply all’. It’s a surprisingly hard thing to get into the habit of doing!