E-Mail Etiquette - The Wonder of BCC

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I think I've been excessively rude to a bunch of people, though most of whom I don't know or don't really give a flying fuck about. Most - not all. That, however, is somewhat beside the point.

It's one thing to send an e-mail to a huge number of recipients - that's fine if it's something important (though importance is often pretty relative). It's another thing to do so without using one of the most flouted "rules" of e-mail etiquette - not putting those multitude of recipients (by omission, not by design) as BCC rather than To, or CC. Wikipedia is nice and helpful as to the exact what and why.

But to me the main reason is privacy. I give my personal address only to people who I give a crap about, as opposed to my public address which I plug into anything and everything up to and including $2 hookers. My personal address is not to be circulated around to people who (refer above) I really don't give a crap about. Also it's an invitation to receive spam and a big target board for e-mail worms - especially when you use e-mail clients that add all your recipients automatically to your address book (yes, you, the idiot who uses Outlook Express' default settings). Fun, huh?

When it comes to this, I have very little patience. Despite the fact that the perpetrator might not be someone I generally want to be rude to, I do what I do on principle. There's very little that's personal about it - I've done it to plenty of people - including people that it's not generally good sense to be rude to.

That said, there is a special place in hell reserved for people who see a long, non-BCCed recipients list and decide that the best thing they can do is "Reply All". Those people should take their knuckle-dragging incompetence and go swivel. These people should be cleansed in righteous fire and sent to the ovens. Fuckwit motherfuckers all.

But yes, there are actually times when you don't BCC, when *everyone* on that list consists only of close friends, or when you need a group to collaborate on something and actually want those addresses circulated. Otherwise, you can bite my shiny metal ass.



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This page contains a single entry by subtitles published on June 12, 2005 5:44 PM.

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