When Spencer Grey sent a message to a group of friends and colleagues last fall notifying them of his new address, he thought nothing of putting all of the recipients’ e-mail addresses in the “To” field of the message.
But when he returned from a vacation in Hawaii a couple of weeks later, he discovered that one of his friends had copied the e-mail addresses of the other recipients and sent them an invitation to a party he was throwing in December–on the theory that any friend of Grey’s was a friend of his. For the most part, it was a harmless, “the more the merrier,” gesture. Except the party invitation ended with a tongue-in-cheek reference to drugs, and Grey’s e-mail list included some clients of his New York Internet consulting business.
“It was this major e-mail faux pas,” Grey said, adding that he was relieved that his friend’s message was not more offensive. “If I have learned anything, it’s the value of the BCC option,” he said.
Just as various aspects of electronic communication have presented new social issues or prompted the evolution of new etiquette, how to deal with recipient lists in electronic messages is an issue that has become more complicated with the growing use of e-mail.
For those who use e-mail to communicate with groups of friends or business contacts, the question is one of the appropriateness of revealing or of hiding all of the recipients’ e-mail addresses. Stories like Grey’s suggest that increasingly, the latter option is gaining momentum.
To hide the addresses in most e-mail programs, users type all of them into the BCC, or blind carbon copy, field, instead of the To or CC areas. In business-related messages to a colleague, the blind CC option is often used to send copies to other individuals without the colleague’s knowledge.
For that reason, using BCC can be devious in the workplace. But anecdotal evidence suggests that the BCC feature is gaining popularity for personal correspondence sent to a large group of people, especially among those who have had their CC lists reused without their consent.
Joy Tadaki, a banker in London, said she has been more careful about group messages since an incident last year when a business school colleague used e-mail addresses from a message Tadaki had sent informing friends about her new address. In this case, the purpose of the message was more commercial than social: The colleague sent Tadaki’s list a message advertising a couch for sale in London.
“Next time I send out a change of address, I will definitely do BCC,” she said.
Even so, Tadaki said there were still cases when she would use the To field for group messages–namely, an invitation to a party or some other social gathering. “It allows people to see who else is coming or who is invited,” she said.
And that issue, at least in terms of social correspondence, is what presents the “to CC or to BCC” dilemma. Privacy concerns have increasingly made Internet users skittish about sharing their e-mail addresses. But it can be a bit disturbing to receive a party invitation via e-mail where the To field says “undisclosed recipients.”
