jeffharbert.com

If you’re sending an email to more than one person, it’s not always a good idea to put everyone’s email address in the TO field. Every address you put in the TO field will be visible to everyone who receives the email. People often like to keep their email addresses private, and you would be sharing it if you put everyone’s address in the TO field. Instead, add them to the BCC field. Let’s go over some rules.

• If the email is work related and and it’s only going to coworkers inside your company, use the TO field.
• If you’re email a coworker or customer and you want your boss to have a copy of the email, use the TO field unless you don’t want the recipient to know you’ve copied your boss on the email.
• If it’s a personal email and everyone in your list knows everyone else - with no exceptions - use the TO field.
• If it’s a personal email and everyone in your list does NOT know everyone else, use the BCC field.

Why that last one? I, like many people, keep tight control over my personal email address. I don’t mind my friends having it, but I do not want your sister’s best friend’s husband’s cousin to have it. Instead, put your own email address in the TO field, and put everyone elses email address into the BCC field. That will retain the privacy of everyone’s email addresses.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 12:59 pm and is filed under How I do IT. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.