Here's an explanation of the reason many use the blind carbon copy
feature. Yeah, I'm not a fan of the indiscriminate use of the word blind,
but I think this use is here to stay so I'm learning to live with it.
kelly
the New York Times
February 10, 2000
Increasingly, E-Mail Users Find They Have Something to Hide
By SUSAN STELLIN
When Spencer Grey sent a message to a group of friends and
colleagues last fall notifying them of his new address, he thought
nothing of putting all of the recipients' e-mail addresses in the
To field of the message.
But when he returned from a vacation in Hawaii a couple of weeks
later, he discovered that one of his friends had copied the e-mail
addresses of the other recipients and sent them an invitation to a
party he was throwing in December -- on the theory that any friend
of Mr. Grey's was a friend of his. For the most part, it was a
harmless, "the more the merrier" gesture. Except the party
invitation ended with a tongue-in-cheek reference to drugs, and Mr.
Grey's e-mail list included some clients of his New York Internet
consulting business.
"It was this major e-mail faux pas," Mr. Grey said, adding that he
was relieved that his friend's message was not more offensive.
"If I have learned anything, it's the value of the Bcc option," he
said.
Just as various aspects of electronic communication have presented
new social issues or prompted the evolution of new etiquette, how
to deal with recipient lists in electronic messages is an issue
that has become more complicated with the growing use of e-mail.
For those who use e-mail to communicate with groups of friends or
business contacts, the question is one of the appropriateness of
revealing or of hiding all of the recipients' e-mail addresses.
Stories like Mr. Grey's suggest that increasingly, the latter
option is gaining momentum.
To hide the addresses in most e-mail programs, users type all of
the them into the Bcc, or blind Cc, field, instead of the To or Cc
areas. In business-related messages to a colleague, the blind Cc
option is often used to send copies to other individuals without
the colleague's knowledge.
For that reason, using Bcc can be devious in the workplace. But
anecdotal evidence suggests that the Bcc feature is gaining
popularity for personal correspondence sent to a large group of
people, especially among those who have had their Cc lists reused
without their consent.
Joy Tadaki, a banker in London, said she has been more careful
about group messages since an incident last year when a colleague
from business school used the e-mail addresses from a message Ms.
Tadaki had sent informing friends about her new address. In this
case, the purpose of the message was more commercial than social:
the colleague sent Ms. Tadaki's list a message advertising a couch
for sale in London.
"It was a bit annoying for a lot of people," Ms. Tadaki said,
particularly since she has lived in various countries and her
e-mail list included friends in the United States, Singapore and
Japan -- it was not a list of people who were likely to buy a couch
in England.
Like Mr. Grey, Ms. Tadaki said having her e-mail list borrowed made
her rethink how she addresses messages to a large list. "Next time
I send out a change of address, I will definitely do Bcc," she
said.
Even so, Ms. Tadaki said there were still cases when she would use
the To field for group messages -- namely, an invitation to a party
or some other social gathering. "It allows people to see who else
is coming or who is invited," she said.
And that issue, at least in terms of social correspondence, is what
presents the "to Cc or to Bcc" dilemma. On one hand, privacy
concerns have increasingly made Internet users skittish about
sharing their e-mail addresses -- a view that in some cases extends
to friends' addresses.
On the other hand, it can be a bit disturbing to receive a party
invitation via e-mail where the To field says "undisclosed
recipients" or "recipient list suppressed" -- phrases some e-mail
programs insert when all of the recipients have been blind Cc'd on
a message.
Donna Booher, the marketing communications manager for health-care
technology company in Silicon Valley, said she tries to balance
Internet etiquette with social etiquette when deciding how to
address group messages. To pass along information about a change of
address, a new job or some other announcement, she said, she
generally uses the Bcc feature.
For party invitations, though, whether she Cc's or Bcc's the
addresses depends on the size of the event. "If it's a small group
and I think people might want to carpool or something, then I Cc,"
Ms. Booher said. "They know each other and they're not going to
spam each other." But when she is having a bigger party, Ms. Booher
said she generally blind Cc's the entire list.
"There's no reason to give everybody your Cc list and have them
potentially use it for spam," she said.
Despite these precautions, Ms. Booher said an acquaintance once
asked her for her e-mail contact list to invite everybody on it to
another event. Ms. Booher demurred. "I said, 'Why don't you just
bring flyers to my party and pass them out instead.' "
_________________________________________________________________
A feature that masks recipient lists for e-mail appears to be growing
in popularity.
_________________________________________________________________
As for those who said they had used e-mail addresses gleaned from
friends' correspondence, most were reluctant to have their names
published, for fear of being electronically blacklisted.
But off the record, a former employee of an Internet company in
California admitted to forwarding a particularly lengthy list of
e-mail addresses to the company's sales group, noting that the
domain names of the addresses represented a "gold mine" of sales
leads at other Internet ventures.
Meanwhile, an aspiring New York theater director acknowledged a
habit of scanning the other e-mail addresses on group messages from
friends in the business, on the off chance a networking opportunity
might present itself.
Of course, contacts initiated via a serendipitous encounter with a
list of e-mail addresses are not always considered unwelcome or
suspect. In some cases, a group e-mail can spark a new relationship
or reconnect old friends.
Beth Niestat, a program coordinator in Boston for the Jewish campus
organization Hillel, got back in touch with a friend from high
school when she recognized her name on a group e-mail message from
a mutual friend. Ultimately, the correspondence sputtered out. But
Ms. Niestat said she suspected most people shared her tendency to
peruse the other e-mail addresses listed on group messages.
In fact, she said her friend Katy Filner has gone one step further
-- on occasion striking up random e-mail conversations with other
recipients of a message from an acquaintance, asking things like,
"I saw your name on Bob's e-mail list and wondered, how do you know
him?"
"She figured, if this person is on Bob's list, he's one step closer
than a stranger," Ms. Niestat said. "The thing about e-mail is you
do things a little bit more capriciously."
Ms. Filner confirmed that she had indeed initiated e-mail
conversations in this rather offbeat manner, noting that a good
source of e-mail addresses were the joke messages people often
forward to friends -- in most cases, leaving all the previous
recipients' addresses visible in the headers.
"At the time, I was single and I thought, oh, I'll just look for a
guy's name," Ms. Filner said. She said she sent messages to about
five people, at least one of whom wrote back saying, "Don't ever
write to me again." But one person responded more positively and
they ended up corresponding via e-mail for about a year.
Although she hasn't written to anyone found on a list lately, Ms.
Filner said she still scanned the other addresses listed on e-mail
messages. "I think it's fun just to see if I know anyone," she
said.
As for her own policy about sharing friends' e-mail addresses, Ms.
Filner said she always Bcc's large lists. "I never forward people's
names because I know what people like me do," she said, laughing.
Which is why those who send e-mail messages to multiple recipients
would do well to remember that once you hit the Send button, it's
out of your address book and out onto a very large, very public
network. In other words, Cc at your own risk.
______________________________________________________________
Susan Stellin at [log in to unmask] welcomes your comments and
suggestions.
______________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask] In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html
|