BCC Please

God bless 43 Folders for Thanks. No. and Brett Kelly for setting up this BCC explainer page. They were both far more polite than I am inclined to be on this topic.

There are few things in digital life more annoying than being on someone's email forward list. I don't want to get an email that's been forwarded to hundreds of people and have to scroll for six pages to get to what is probably a bad joke or some political hack story or something that urges me to pass the message along to at least ten other people or I'll have a bad day. I'll take my chances on the bad day, but I promise you I don't read those messages. In fact, I never see them anymore, because I have my email program filter everything that has Fwd in the subject line straight to Trash.

And for those of you who think I'm a crank, and I know who you are, try this on for size. Do you have your email set up to add every address you send or reply to to your contact list? Do you know whether everyone you forward to has their email set up that way? It is thoughtless to assume that everyone who uses email is savvy enough to know their way around setting up their email account or program. It's just rude, RUDE, to be lazy and hit the forward button and start tossing in email addresses.

If the email is worth forwarding, it takes very little effort to remove all the previous forwards from the email and to then use BCC instead.

I don't need to be in the contact list for people I don't know and will never meet, and they don't need my email address and/or name clogging up their contact list unnecessarily. In case you hadn't noticed, I don't blithely forward email to anyone, nevermind everyone. Please do me the favor of showing me the same courtesy. If that's too much effort for you, please lose my email address.