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Mike Easter contributed the following article on sending out a bunch of email addresses to people who should not get them by dumping all of your recipients' addresses into the To header of your mail. It sums up the issue well enough that I decided to publish it here instead of writing my own. My comments follow.
Some of my BCC netiquette attitudes.
If you send an email to several people, such as a Xmas email, it is not appropriate to be sending various people who don't have each other's email addresses those addresses -- for several reasons.
First, it is rude. Just because you have someone's email address doesn't mean you should hand it out to numerous others, who they may not even know -- or even if they do know them, it is not your right to give some person some other person's email addy, even if a person asks you for it.
Second, it is insecure. All kinds of people get all kinds of worms and trojans, and the more email addresses that are on any infected system, the more propagations go out to those addresses (and somtimes appearing to originate at some of them). So when you send out bunches of addresses to bunches of addresses it creates a greater exposure for them all.
The proper netiquette, in my book, if Aunt Alice asks you for Aunt Sophie's addy, is to email Aunt Sophie Aunt Alice's request for Sophie's addy so that Sophie can send Alice the addy. My netiquette assumes that anyone asking for anyone else's addy is asking for their own addy to be given to the one they're asking about. In fact, in my opinion, Aunt Alice should've been asking you to ask Aunt Sophie to send her Sophie's address instead of asking you for it.
I also consider it within the bounds of netiquette to explain to people who send me a huge pile of To addies that they shouldn't be doing that and why.
There's another little netiquette problem about the "undisclosed recipients" problem that results from some usage of BCC. I think that if you are sending a message which looks like a "personal" type message which may be just sent to two or three unknowns, that often it is appropriate to say who is getting the email, even when their email addy isn't given.
That is, say, Tom and Fred and Alice all know each other and know you, but you don't know if each has each other's addy or not.
I think if you email the three and it says "undisclosed recipients" that you should use one of several methods of saying that you sent it to Tom and Fred and Alice so that they all know that the other received it from you, but that you didn't disclose the addies of each to each other.
I don't have a hard and fast rule about Mike's final point, telling the few recipients of an email who else got it. Sometimes I do; more frequently I don't.
But certainly he's dead on with the rest of his article, including the part about it being your right to complain (and try to educate) someone who is broadcasting your address all over the place without your permission.
And please note that when I send email to a BCC list, the recipients don't get their copies addressed to "undisclosed recipients". Perhaps that's more brain-deadness from Outlook Express; I don't really know; that's something I'd not even touch with my worst enemy's ten-foot pole.
To this last issue, Mike responded thus:
Regarding the undisclosed recipients issue for OE.
For OE, the problem arises with the unpopulated To: field. That trips the "undisclosed recipients".
That's why the OE user is well advised to use some "contrived" address book entries with the "name" or handle being such as "Tom, Fred, and Alice" and the email addy being the sender's own -- or "Mike's Christmas Tidings" as an addressbook name with sender's email addy -- then that is clicked into the To field and the appropriate BCCs (or BCC group - which is another subject).
I don't know what other mua[s] put into the To field if there's nothing there. I think putting the sender's regular name and email addy as the To and From is weird looking. The To should say who it is to, even if the To doesn't contain any actual email addies but the sender's.
How To Use BCC: Put each recipient's address in the BCC field instead of listing them in the To field. Use the same syntax you have been using in the To field – generally a comma-separated list. If you don't see a BCC field when you're in composition mode in your mail client then read the documentation, search the web or ask someone who knows more about your software than you do to help you make it visible. Put your own address in the To field (you'll get a copy).
As for me, I have a separate mailbox for such BCCed email, so that's what I use in my To header; that way I end up with a folder for just those, so if I want to know if I ever sent out a particular email to my friends, I can just look in that box. They don't indicate who they went to – but they do show that I sent them to some list of friends and they'll give you the Subject. Then, if you're saving copies of what you send, a copy should be in your Sent folder (or wherever you've directed them) that should show the BCC header, and thus the list to which you sent each one.
Thanks for that link, DCMoose, and thanks to Beauregard T. Shagnasty for some corrections to my own comments.
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