How using BCC reduces spam.
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for
askleo.com.
BCC is one of those tools and technologies
that some people just don't quite get don't understand exactly how it works.
I'll dive into that a little bit.
But one of the most important things it
does is it actually helps reduce the amount of spam on the Internet.
Here's the question. "Is it true that if I
use BCC to email attachments, it will mean less danger of spam.
How's that?"
Well, to be clear for the question, BCC has nothing to do with attachments.
They are two completely separate things.
There's just no relationship between the two.
On the other hand,
using BCC on messages you send, it's not going to reduce the amount
of spam you get necessarily, but it's going to reduce the amount
of spam that could potentially be generated because of your email.
Let's look at a couple of examples.
So I'll show you exactly why this is.
I term this a Privacy violation because if you take a look at the example,
there's a message that you got that is from a friend of yours.
It's to you, and it is CCed to, in this case, four or five other people.
And it's basically just an example of a forwarded joke.
So what's happened here?
Your friend has emailed you a joke.
And of course, you think it's funny. That's great.
But the point is that at the same time, your friend has exposed the email
addresses of everyone else he sent that message to.
Now that may not be a problem.
It may not seem like much, but not everybody wants their email
address exposed to everybody else, especially not to people they don't know.
So you've now got these six or five other email addresses.
If you wanted to, you could harvest them.
You could put them in your address book.
You could send email to them.
You could do whatever you wanted to
all because your friend included their email addresses as CCs or To's.
Even in an email he sent to you,
it gets worse because this is where you become
complicit.
If you now forward that message because you thought it was a funny joke and you
want to share it with some of your friends, you forward it to somebody
and somebody else and somebody else and somebody else.
In the example here,
you're forwarding it to a close friend, a family member, a pal, a colleague.
Point being that you've also used either two or CC.
And whoever gets this message can now see all of the other email addresses that you
sent to, but they can also see the email addresses your friend included
originally.
So not only are you exposing the email addresses of your friends and colleagues
that you're forwarding the message on to you're, also exposing the email
addresses of everybody else who originally got the email at the same time you did
that, as I think of it, is what I would call a Privacy violation.
You have exposed a bunch of email
addresses of other people who might not want their email address exposed
to a bunch of people that they probably don't know.
Now, of course, we trust all our friends, right?
We wouldn't send this on to somebody that we wouldn't trust.
But
you're assuming for one thing that their email will never be compromised.
You're also assuming that their email isn't archived somewhere.
You're assuming that that email, that message isn't going to be accessible,
to malware, to scammers, to spammers, to people who are basically looking
for email addresses every time they connect to the internet.
That's a lot of assumptions.
All it really takes is one person to do it wrong and everything gets exposed.
You can be a good email citizen by doing exactly two things.
One, instead of entering all the email
addresses on the two or CC line, use the BCC, the Blind Carbon copy line.
Instead.
That way, those email addresses will not appear in the email that you forward.
They'll still get it.
There will still be recipients, but their email addresses won't be visible.
And second, before you press, send,
click on the body of your email message and delete all of those other email
addresses from the body that were included in the email you received.
A lot of people don't realize this,
but when you forward a message, if you click in the body,
sometimes you have to click on little three dot ellipses to expand the body,
but the bottom line is that it's there
for you to edit, and you can edit it however you want.
And one of the most useful things you can
do is to delete all of those other email addresses from the body.
And in the case of a joke, delete everything that isn't the joke, right?
So that then protects everybody else from having their email address exposed.
That's all you had to do.
BCC and delete everything other than what
you really intended to forward from the message itself.
So here's what that looks like, right.
When we go to forward that mail.
In this case, it's from you.
You send it to you.
In other words, you're sending an email to yourself.
A lot of email programs require that you have something in the two line.
When we're doing this, it's usually most useful to just send it to yourself.
There is no CC line, but everybody that you want to send this
to everybody that you want to forward this message to is in the BCC line.
And then if you take a look, the body no longer has email addresses in it at all.
All it has in this example is the joke.
What the recipients see then is from you
to you and the joke that's it not only are you not exposing all these other email
addresses, but you're making it easier for the message to be read.
Right? You're removing all this clutter
that otherwise other people will be looking at.
So please consider using BCC when you're forwarding, especially to a large number
of people, and consider editing the body of the message that you're about
to forward to remove any potentially Privacy violating information.
I hope that's helpful.
I hope you take it on if you've got questions or comments or if you want
to see related links and more, visit Askleo.com/11797.
I'm Leo Notenboom this is AskLeo.com