BCC Use It
I am sure like me you have been the victim of Reply All in an email sent to a lot of people. I challenge you today to show at least one person the BCC line in an email. Many people do not know about it! It was not something taught to me in school (email did not exist when I was a student!) so we need to point out this important feature in email.
Blind Carbon Copy (BCC)
BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy. This means the recipients of the email do not see who the email was sent to.
Size Matters
If you are emailing the 5 third grade teachers you would not use BCC probably, you would put all 5 emails in the “To” line of the email. If you are emailing all the teachers in the school, use BCC. Small groups it makes sense to know who the email is sent to. There is good reason to “Reply All” when communicating with a small group. Not so with a large group.
Protect My Privacy
Using BCC protects the email address privacy of all the email recipients. If the people you are emailing do not know each other it is rude to reveal email addresses to strangers. If you are not sure if who you are emailing knows each other, use BCC.
As a parent, I have had my kids teachers (admittedly well-meaning) send an email to every single parent in the class. Thus giving my email address to every parent in the class. I was not asked if I wanted my personal information shared with all of the other parents. Use BCC to protect the privacy of the email recipients. [tweet]If you do not have permission to distribute personal information, do not.[/tweet]
Thanks – No Thanks
Quite possibly one of the most annoying things to happen in the 21st century is people replying “Thanks” to a large group of strangers. When an email was sent to all parents and one by one they reply with an acknowledgment of the announcement with “Thanks” this clogs up my email and causes me to miss more important emails. I am likely to delete the entire thread thus missing anything of value I might actually want to know.
[tweet]DO NOT BE REPLY ALL WITH “THANKS” GUY! [/tweet]
If the person who sent an email was so insensitive as to include the email address of a large group of people, be careful to check where your email is going before you reply “Thanks.”
Let the Sender Reply All
Sure, maybe your “Reply All” would be edifying for the entire group. However, the most likely result of not using BCC is someone accidentally replying all. If you send an email to a large group and BCC the recipients, if someone replies to you with a question or statement that would be good for the entire group then you, the sender, can copy that information and reply to all.