Comments on: Email Etiquette

By: Hinnerk

Hinnerk — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 08:09:57 +0000

BCC to: Alice, Bob, Eve

Dear Sir,

I guess one can have the best of both worlds.

With kind regards
Hinnerk

PS: I’m not familiar with formal english/american letters â€” is this example acceptable?

By: dave

dave — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 01:28:28 +0000

Good point Mark, that’s a better way to phrase a guideline. I think if you can assume the others all have each others email addresses include them. If not than you should bcc, unless you are making introductions for a conversation, in which case you want to be giving everyone the ability to email all. But general forwards, pieces of information, or hey check out this link should be bcc. The other one is I always bcc the emails to all of my students (like class updates), but it is clear in the email that it is going out to everyone.

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 16:13:42 +0000

There is an opposing take on BCC, namely, it suggests that there are other people that are included in the conversation that are being hidden from the recipient. It almost feels like talking behind someone’s back. Some email clients will indicate that a BCC list exists, and I always get the creepy feeling that there’s someone listening in who I don’t know about.

Although I agree that the “hey, I’ve changed my email address” could well be accomplished without explicitly listing all the recipients, I would say that most correspondence that resembles a conversation should be very clear about all the participants. That, it seems to me, is only polite.

By: David Brake

David Brake — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 14:26:29 +0000

I would BCC people a lot more if I thought they would get it but I get the impression that quite a few spam filters and email servers will neither send nor deliver emails with more than a few addresses in the BCC field. Yet another reason why spammers are messing up the Internet…