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Forwards and the BCC line

By Meg | August 6, 2007

What do email forwards have to do with appearance? Well, when you break the rules of ‘netiquette’ you risk looking like a newbie or worse, inconsiderate. Until this past couple of weeks, one of my email addresses was spam free - for years. Now it is being inundated with spam, which is a waste of my time. I’ve had to abandon email addresses in the past due to spam, which is a huge hassle, so I take it very seriously. Why the sudden spam? In both this case and previous cases I can link it to one thing - forwards.

No, I don’t consider forwards from friends and families to necessarily be spam. If you are reading this and you are friends or family, please do not assume that I am talking about you. Some of the stuff that I receive that is sent one to one is actually quite good. However, most that I have received probably should be counted as spam. I know what it’s like to have a great joke that you want to share, but I’d much rather hear it in person or over the phone - especially when I’ve probably received the same joke before from someone else. If you are forwarding jokes or missing child alerts or warnings to anyone other than friends or family, please be aware that - no matter how good your attentions are - it is highly unprofessional. It’s even worse when the warnings you send could easily be debunked with a trip to Snopes. Also bad, sending intimidating emails about your politics or religion to co-workers. If you wouldn’t say it in person, don’t email it.

But I digress… The reason that one of my email addresses recently started receiving spam is that I happened to email a local stranger about something they posted on a local Freecycle group. The item had already been picked up by someone, so I didn’t even note the address mentally until I received a forward about some kid, supposedly missing. There was my email address along with dozens of others. I later searched my emails to see how the person got my email address. Well, I politely emailed them and told them what I will tell you below, they called me a jerk and continued forwarding me emails a few times more. I hope you will appreciate the information a lot more than they did.

Don’t put every email address you’ve ever emailed or receive email from on your forwards list. While I didn’t say it to the person above, I really wanted to call them a few bad names just for that. The real reason why I was ticked was that there was my email address for everyone to see, including spammers. Now, the other people who were sent the email probably didn’t care about my email address. However, my address and their addresses were now being forwarded with the email, on and on and on and on. Even if you trust all the people you forward to, do you trust all the people they forward to and all the people they forward to and on and on and on? If one of them sells emails to spammers or is a spammer, then you just gave them fresh fodder. If one of those people even just has a virus that takes the contacts from their emails, then you can also count on those email addresses getting spammed. I’m guessing the latter in my most recent case as so far I keep getting the same emails from seemingly innocuous email addresses. With another email address, it did proceed rather quickly to full blown spam with all the indecent proposals.

What can you do? First off, don’t forward indiscriminately. Ask yourself, does it really need to be forwarded? Does it really need to be forwarded to everyone on your list? I know a lot of you think, “Well, I’d rather be safe than sorry. This email might save a life.” It might, but the chances are pretty slim and most of the forwards of that type are hoaxes. Check Snopes first if you don’t want to look like a sucker. If it must be sent, and you can’t just call the person, use the BCC line. When you compose an email to multiple people, put the email addresses in the line marked BCC line instead of the TO: line. BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy and it hides the email addresses from the other recipients. It won’t hide your email address, but that’s a good reason to rethink forwards all together.

So, there is my rant on forwards and BCC lines. If any of you do happen to get my email address, I hope you will respect my wishes in this regard. No worries, I won’t be sending you forwards either. Please spread the word, preferably by mouth (though I do appreciate links).


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