Correct Way to Send Out Group Emails
November 12, 2007 · Print This Article
When you send out an email to a group of people, simply putting them all on the to field is bad form. First, it exposes all the email addresses, so everyone can see everyone else’s emails. Second, if someone accidentally hits “Reply All” instead of “Reply” their response can easily be sent to the entire group instead of just you.
A few years ago, I got an email from a friend who was studying at Yale. It was a yearly update about what was going on in his life. He put everyone he knew in the To: field. This included old classmates, current professors, relatives, etc.
One of his friends got the message and decided to respond with an update of all the stuff going on in her life. She accidentally hit the “Reply All” button and sent a bunch of personal details to a list of mostly complete strangers.
There was another case awhile back where a real estate company sent out a message to a bunch of people looking for apartments in New York. Everyone was listed in the To field which provided a very handy list that any recipient could quickly sell to a competitive real estate company.
There is a simple way to prevent this. Simply put yourself in the To field and everyone else in the BCC field. That way both “Reply” and “Reply All” will only come back to you and recipients can’t see each other’s email addresses.
This image shows how this type of setup should look in Gmail. Often the BCC field is hidden or needs to be expanded before you can add people to it. If you can’t find the BCC field, look around or read the help file. It is almost certainly there, but you may have to turn it on.
I have a love/hate relationship with this technique. While it is wonderful for protecting email addresses and preventing reply-all bombs, it also increases the possibility of tripping spam filters. My spam filters dramatically lower the priority of messages where I don’t appear in the “To:” or “Cc:” fields. That said, anything that is being mass mailed to a lot of people probably deserves the lower classification!
The only issue with this lies in gmail itself. In most cases, messages are marked as “spam” if the sender’s address is not in the “to:” field.
According to the help file, this can be resolved if your address is in the recipient’s address book, but my experience has shown that this isn’t always true.
So I guess this is just a grain of salt type of comment…
Danny, and why do you think gmail put this filter in place to start with? due to so many people sending so many emails in the to field, which made it almost impossible to discriminate real from fake.
Let’s recall OUR inbox as property, do not let your email address on the loose
Yes this is a great tip. Another good tip is creating “Groups” within your email program and putting the group in the BCC field. This way you don’t have to enter each name each time you wanna send out a group email.
Another area I dislike in sending out group emails is when people do not remove all the messages header details. Some people are great at BCC a list of people but forget to remove the header information from when they hit Forward. That way the other people’s mistakes are not showing up.
Thanks for the post.
JB
@Stevenson & Danny - I agree that sending out messages in this way may trigger some spam filters. This is particularly true if you are sending messages to people you don’t normally correspond with. However, my experience has been good when I’m emailing to people with whom I normally exchange messages. Maybe this is because I’m in their address book or the spam filter is using past emails to determine what future ones will look like.
If I’m sending something that is extremely vital, I’m probably going to follow up with a phone call or ask for confirmation anyway.
@Jeff - That is one of my pet peeves as well–especially in some email programs where forwards actually show up as a message inside the message instead of just being indented.
Let’s add a quick note for those that forget these simple steps. If someone has decided to not be net-friendly and puts everyone in the To: or Cc: lines and you have something to say to the sender…hit REPLY not REPLY ALL.
Nothing is more disruptive than having a flood of REPLY ALL messages because the sender elected to not use the proper BCC format.
One other thing. If you are worried that someone won’t know what groups you send a work message out (with the BCC) to, then put it in the opening of the message. For example, “This sent to IT, Mail Room, Operations Management”
Thanks for the tip.
Mike