In the age of Facebook, in an era where privacy and anonymity are a thing of the very distant past, quite a few “features” of technology have been banished from daily use, forced to languish in the corner in a sad state of disuse and disrepair. But perhaps none have suffered such a miserable and regrettable fate as the BCC.<\/p>\n
Quick: if you’re fighting with a friend and want to let your BFF know what’s going on as you send your frenemy a nasty messsage \u2014 what’s the best way to pull that off?<\/p>\n
If you’ve completed the switch to Facebook mindset, your convoluted answer would consist of something to effect “Send a message to X, copy and paste it, and send it to Y.” And you’d be right – Facebook doesn’t give you another way of pulling this off. FAIL!<\/strong><\/p>\n Let’s say your technical skills are not<\/em> in such a pitiful state and you have enough sense to still use email for day-to-day communications. What’s your answer then? “I’ll just send X an email, then forward my result to Y.” aaaaaaaaand that’s another fail.<\/p>\n See, there’s this oft-overlooked feature my commandline mail client from the 80s has that solves this. It’s called “Blind Carbon Copy,” or BCC for short. You can send an email to more than one person without all your recipients knowing who you sent it to! <\/p>\n Unfortunately, to use BCC it isn’t enough to just know about it and want to use it yourself – the people you’re BCCing in your emails need to have enough sense to look up at the “To:” line in their email client and find out what exactly is their role in this message. Are they the primary recipients of this email? Or perhaps they’re only officially in the loop, so that they can have a copy of this email for future reference and, if necessary, can step in when needed in the future? Or have they been BCC’d in the message – invisibly copied in on the contents of the email, because the sender wants them to see it without necessarily divulging this fact to the original recipient?<\/p>\n But if people don’t look to see what status they’ve been delegated to in this email, then it just doesn’t work. And unfortunately, those of us that do<\/em> use BCC no longer can. Imagine this email below:<\/p>\n To: Margaret<\/p>\n BCC: Jane<\/p>\n Subject: The secret you told me about!<\/p>\n Dear Margaret,<\/p>\n I just wanted to say thanks for confiding in me. I was really sorry to hear about ________, hopefully things will work out.<\/p>\n Chin up!<\/p>\n Carl<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Carl felt it would be OK to share this tidbit of info with Jane, his long time confidante. Margaret didn’t want anyone to know. Later that day, Jane sees Margaret at the supermarket, and before you know it:<\/p>\n Jane: Hey Margaret! How are you doing? Fancy seeing you here!<\/p>\n Margaret: Oh, hi Jane!<\/p>\n Jane: How’s the baby coming along?<\/p>\n Margaret: CAAAAARL!!!!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Yep. Because Carl hadn’t made it clear to Jane that Margaret didn’t know she knew<\/em>, Jane figured everyone in the original conversation was “in on it.”<\/p>\n Given the unfortunately high percentage of people that fall into the same category as our Jane here, Carl just can’t use this technique any more. He simply can’t trust that Jane will have enough sense to realize she’s being invisibly BCC’d in the conversation, and has to result to this crude technique of letting her know:<\/p>\n To: Jane<\/p>\n Subject: FWD: The secret you told me about!<\/p>\n Hi Jane. This is a secret, Marge doesn’t know I told anyone! See you later!<\/p>\n -Carl<\/p>\n To: Margaret<\/p>\n Subject: The secret you told me about!<\/p>\n Dear Margaret,<\/p>\n I just wanted to say thanks for confiding in me. I was really sorry to hear about ________, hopefully things will work out.<\/p>\n Chin up!<\/p>\n Carl<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I’m always shocked to find “techie friends” just don’t get BCC. To illustrate the point, one of my more well-versed friends in the arcane art of email called me up the other day: “I just wanted to double-check – if I have a list of 400 people I need to email at once but I don’t want them all to know each other’s emails…. It’s possible with BCC somehow, right? And how?”<\/p>\n Shame, really. Rest in peace, BCC. You were a good friend and we had some great times together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the age of Facebook, in an era where privacy and anonymity are a thing of the very distant past, quite a few “features” of technology have been banished from daily use, forced to languish in the corner in a … Continue reading \n
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