BCC: = Blind Carbon Copy

If you and I know each other—not very well, but well enough to talk once every six to eight weeks—and I randomly asked you to hand over the email addresses of every important contact in your address book, would you do it? Of course not.

Yet I see this happen all the time. For the second time this week, I've received an email from an aquaintance with their entire address book in the CC: field!

This totally blows my mind.


I understand why people do it, I guess, but it seems common sense to me that some people on the list may not want their email divulged to everyone else on the list... and doubly so if they've never met any of the other people.

Here's a tip you can tag as "all around good business etiquette"—before you click "send" on a mass forwarded email, consider for a moment that some of your email's recipients might have given their email to you with the implicit agreement you wouldn't bandy their email about so thoughtlessly. So extend your friends and business associates the simple courtesy of removing their email from the publicly viewable CC: field and instead pasting it into the invisible BCC: field. And don't forget to add money to the karma bank by deleting any emails in the body of the email, too.

Because, you know... haven't you ever wondered where spammers get your email from?