Email Should Ask Before Sending Many CCs
By
Staten Island, NY Posted: 12/2/2015 1:00:00 AM
Sending hundreds of emails to a private list is a common mistake.
The CC: box is a fraction of an inch from the BCC: box when you send an email, so it's easy to accidentally paste a long list of emails in the wrong box. That little mistake can cause a ton of problems for the sender, and everyone in the list.
For example, I got an email today that was meant for Amazon's Top 500 Reviewers. That's not unusual, I'm in the top 500. The trouble is, the sender didn't use BCC, so the message had the email address of just about ALL of the "Top 500"... Oops. Now everyone on the list has the email address of just about every top reviewer. That's a big privacy problem, and it's not the first time somebody made the same time with the Amazon list. In fact, a few weeks ago, the email addresses of everyone in the top 10,000 that have a visible email address were accidentally attached as an Excel file.
The same thing happened to me a couple of weeks ago, when I received a newsletter that had at least 200 email addresses in the CC. That's pretty bad, but it got worse. Some of the people in the list hit "Reply All", and the entire list got several blasts from people in the list, which then made even more people hit "Reply All" wondering why they were getting so many emails. Eventually somebody sent one last "Reply All" telling everyone it was a mistake and that they shouldn't hit the "Reply All" link. A week later, the confusion finally ended.
Email platforms like can eliminate a lot of headaches if they simply asked for confirmations whenever there's a large number of addresses in the CC box.
All it would take is a small number of companies to add confirmations to make a difference. After all, most mail is sent via Outlook, Apple Mail, and web providers like Gmail, Yahoo, HotMail. So, what are they waiting for?
Joe Crescenzi, Founder
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