"The Bible is a remarkable fountain: the more one draws and drinks of it, the more it stimulates thirst."
- Martin Luther
Saturday, May 14, 2005
salguod offers good advice regarding your e-mail's BCC feature:
If you're going to send these emails on to your entire mailing list, by all means use BCC instead of the To or CC fields. I went through my copy of the MS email tracking message and found 108 email addresses. If I was a spammer, I just found 108 new victims. By using BCC, you only annoy your friends with useless hoaxes without exposing them to a spam risk.
I'll go one better. Even if you're sending out a "friendly" group e-mail, but the recipients don't all know each other, use the BCC feature.
I get e-mails all the time from friends and family who aren't really forwarding stupid urban legends or sappy stories but are actually sending along news, photos, prayer requests, or family updates. That's why it's so hard to tell them I'd prefer all the people they know (but I don't) not have my e-mail address. When you don't use the BCC feature, you're basically sharing my e-mail address with strangers without my permission. It doesn't matter to me if you know them; I don't.
Not using BCC also (I think) opens folks up to virus spreading. The way some e-mail programs work, if you send a group e-mail out just using CC, some recipients end up with strangers' email addresses in their address book or contact file. Then, if they get a virus, they can end up sending it to complete strangers. All because you didn't BCC.
And it's just good manners.
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Comments on "A Good Word on E-Mail Etiquette":
3. Jared
- 05/16/2005 6:35 am CDT
http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050213/COLUMNISTS0203/502130333/1089/BUSINESS
Tomlinson's anti-hypen stance, in which he sides with other Internet gurus, helped formulate a pattern: The tech world seems to like "email." The word world -- computer columnists, media-relations people and writers who cover electonics -- gravitate to "e-mail."
Levine said eBay doesn't use a hyphen in its own name, and a spokesman for eBay President Meg Whitman said the company "as a general rule" doesn't use a hyphen when writing about electronic mail.
"At first, without a hyphen, `email' looked like a typo," Levine said. "Many still think `ecommerce' looks strange."
Levine remains neutral on the issue, but he did have humorist Roy Blount Jr. weigh in on his Web site: "I dare say the hyphen in e-mail will wither away, but I vote for it. You wouldn't write `Abomb' for `A-bomb,' or `opositive' for `O-positive, or `Xray,' -- which looks like the name of a science-fiction villain -- or `fstop' . . ."
Fwiw, I'll nearly always side with the style guides and commonly accepted formal rules of grammar and punctuation rather than what's popular or what some techies say is best.
I still add an 's to the end of singular possessives even when they end with an s -- eg. Manders's Living Room is technically correct (see the latest ed. of Strunk & White's Elements of Style), and not the more likely seen Manders' Living Room.
(You'll also notice that I use both "e-mail" and "email" in my blog post. The latter was a mistake, though. ;-)
4. salguod
- 05/16/2005 4:48 pm CDT
T-hanks for the l-inkage. Glad to see you still l-urking around my s-ite.
:-P
6. Paula
- 05/17/2005 3:58 pm CDT
Jared, thanks for saying what I would like to say, but for saying it in words I've never been able to articulate so well. Maybe I'll find a way to say so now. I'm so tired of those e-mails from my friends that go to everybody and his brother in seventeen counties.
Andy? Do we kill you d-d-dead?
I think you should start with calling it email instead of e-mail.
:)