You just received an email from your cousin Jane that has 50 people in the address field, contains a 10 megabyte video, and exhorts you to pass it on to everyone you know.  Do you...

A) Reply to all and talk about the funny video?

B) Forward the video to everyone in your address book?

C) Pull out your copy of Switch Craft and make a voodoo doll that squirms when you poke it; put Jane's name on it?

D) Have a conversation with your cousin about email netiquette?

The correct answer, of course, is D, but first you need to go armed with the facts before sitting your cuz down for a little chat.  There were several ways her email message violated basic internet manners, but of course you can't tell her, "Jane, you're rude and have no concept of politeness!" because, as Miss Manners would say, that's rude, too.  Rather, what Jane needs to know is the facts behind what she's doing and how she could be inconveniencing others.  Here are the issues and solutions:

1. Not using BCC. Probably what Jane did was just send the message to everyone in her address book.

• However, she didn't stop to think that not all those people knew each other, or were comfortable sharing their email addresses with strangers. Even worse, what if you end up like Suburban Turmoil and realize your acquaintances are forwarding jokes to your dad? I could see that going wrong in a hurry.
• Not only does this breach privacy, but if one of those 50 recipients gets a virus or malware on their computer, it can harvest your email address and start sending you even more spam.
• In addition, the other recipients can hit "Reply to All" and send a message to the 49 other people on the list saying "Oh yeah, right on, go Jane!" and then someone else will reply to all and say, "How dare you! I resent the implication!" and it just goes downhill from there. Your inbox will now be taken over for a week with Janespam.

Solution - Use BCC: Unless the list of recipients is very short and everyone needs to know who is on it, you should use BCC to send mail to several people. BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy, and anyone whose address is in the BCC field will not see the addresses of the other people in the BCC field. They can see who is in the TO and the CC field.

Alternate solution - make a mailing list: If you will be sending mail to the same group of people over and over, you might think about making a mailing list so that you don't have to remember all their addresses every time you need to send a message. You can do this for free with services like Google Groups or Yahoo Groups (Google or Yahoo ID required), and they will archive messages and sometimes have other features, like a places to upload files.

Coming soon: I'll discuss attachments and chain letters.  Stay tuned!

Posted by Dee | tagged: BCC, netiquette