Net Etiquette 3: Use the BCC field

You’ll find the introduction to this series of posts at the top of my first post on net etiquette.

Here’s number 3.

All e-mail software has the option of sending someone an e-mail using “To” or “CC”. Most people are familiar with that. People are less familiar with the “BCC” option, probably because some e-mail clients (like Microsoft Outlook) hide that option by default. “BCC” stands for “Blind Carbon Copy”; e-mail addresses in here get a copy of the e-mail, but the recipients can’t see who is in the BCC list.

This is not so that can surreptitiously send your e-mail to someone else without other recipients realising that you’ve done so. E-mail is intended to be an open medium. The point is rather one of respecting other people’s privacy. How sure are you that all the people whose e-mail addresses you’ve just put in the To or CC boxes want their e-mail address circulated to all the other people on the list?

I love hearing that friends have just had a baby, moved house, got a new job, and so on. But I don’t need to be put in touch with all of their friends in the process.

This wouldn’t matter too much, were it not for spam-bots and viruses entering the equation. What, you cry? A “web robot” is a piece of software used by a company like google. It crawls the internet looking for valid website addresses, so that it can index the internet and make it searchable. A “spam robot” or “spambot” for short, crawls the internet looking for valid e-mail addresses, so that it can… The payload (bit that does the damage) of many a computer virus does the same thing on the victim’s computer. Person A catches a virus. It trawls through their address book, and every e-mail on the computer, looking for live e-mail addresses. It then sends the list back to whoever programmed it.

So if a friend of yours sends an e-mail to all their friends announcing the birth of baby Johnny, and includes all the e-mail addresses in the e-mail, all it needs is for any one of those friends to get a virus on their computer like that. All 100 friends who got that e-mail then start to get spam. Nice.

Just a little plea to use BCC!

PS: Here’s a test as to whether an e-mail is a BCC one or not. Would any of the recipients of your e-mail need to be able to hit “Reply All” and send a reply to everyone. Baby Johnny’s safe arrival – probably not. A small committee that is discussing an issue – quite possibly.