To: Josie

From: Josie

Subject: BCC-ing Pass It Forward

Chaps,

I’m going to talk to you about how you email. You may already know this, but I
suspect that a greater proportion of the e-population don’t, if their behaviour is
anything to go by. In this era of email harvesting and viruses, spyware and adware,
there follows some very important information.

Most email users will have noticed the ‘CC’ and ‘BCC’ boxes as well as the ‘To’ and
‘From’ ones. The phrase CC means ‘Carbon Copy’ and stems from a time of memos
being circulated in an office environment. The person/people to whom the
memo/email is ostensibly directed, who needs to action the request it contains,
appears in the ‘To’ field. Other people, who may not need to act but need to be kept
‘in the loop’ and informed as to the situation, are in the CC field.

BCC means ‘Blind Carbon Copy’ and is as far as I’m aware, exclusive to emails. The
list of people in the BCC field is invisible to the other people to whom the email is
sent. This is very useful in situations where, for example, you are dealing with a
difficult client and need to copy all correspondence to your manager, but don’t want
the client to see the manager’s contact details on their copy of the email.

Now we come to my point. BCC is the ideal field to be used when sending forwarded
jokes, chain letters, petitions or any other information that gets sent to your friends
and passed on to the wider e-community. When I receive an emailed joke, I like to
read the joke itself, not a lengthy list of all the other people that have passed it on,
who else they sent it to, and their various inane comments.

But it’s not just to satisfy my pedantic nature that I’m saying this, and here is where I
get onto the subject of viruses, spyware and adware. Are you fed up with receiving
emails asking you to purchase medication, stocks and shares, enlargements of body
parts? One of the reasons you’re on the list for receiving this spam is because people
aren’t using BCC. Even more worrying is the fact that many of these spam emails
contain viruses and other hostile programs.

Emails are ‘harvested’ in various ways, one of which is the forwarded joke. Many of
these jokes, chain letters etc. are begun by people who plan to make malicious use of
the email addresses that will eventually boomerang back to them. Even if they are
begun in all innocence, the lack of judicious use of the BCC field will enable the
inevitable end person to make use of your email address in whatever way they wish.
This includes selling it to an agency or creating the spam themselves.

What can we do to stop this from happening? First, when forwarding a joke, delete
any text which includes the names and emails of people who have passed it on and
their comments. You should then have on your screen only the text that was sent in the
original email. Do it now with this one: click ‘forward’ and delete everything up to the
word ‘Chaps’.
Now this is where clever BCC comes in. Write your own email address in the ‘To’
field, and all of the people that you are planning to send the email to in the BCC field.
When you send the email, it will come back to you, and the people who receive it will
only see your name, not anyone else’s. You may notice that this is how I sent this
email to you.

When you look in your ‘Sent Items’ folder, you will not be able to see the people who
have received the email, as you will only see the contents of the visible fields. If you
need to keep a record of who you’ve sent this email to, you should copy the addresses
into a notepad file for future use, before sending. It is a good idea to do this if the
email is something official, for example at work, you are advertising your own site, or
if you are sending emails in batches and need to know who’s had the mail and who
hasn’t.

I am going to set the ball rolling by sending this email out to everyone I know (after
the WritersBeat.com competition is over) and I exhort anyone reading this to do the
same – pass it forward!

Trust plays a big part here, as your name will remain on the email as sender. You trust
that the next person to click forward will use the same BCC method, and delete the
text up to the body of the email. And of course they will, because you are going to
forward this email to them. It’s not enough to simply stop forwarding jokes. If other
people are forwarding jokes to you, then your email address will remain on those
jokes when they are forwarded on, and on. You should be pro-active and begin to use
this method, doing the favour to those who went before, and trusting that others will
do so after you.

Send this email to as many people as you feel fit. In a few months’ time you might
notice a reduction in the amount of spam you receive. I’m not promising your wishes
will come true, but I’d like to live in a world where I don’t have to delete fifty emails
before I find one that I want to read, wouldn’t you?

Josie Henley, a concerned member of the global e-community in Cardiff, UK

www.josiehenley.net

PS When this is received by people who don’t know me, feel free to send it back to
me. My email address is on my website. I expect it to be perfectly clean, without any
trace of other people’s email addresses, except the one who sent it. Then I will know
that my campaign against email harvesters is successful.