For the love of god, use Bcc:

14 July 2004 @ lunch time | Comments (3)

Friends, loved ones, acquaintances – please let me offer you a bit of friendly advice from the heart.

Let’s say you open your awesome email client today to find something incredibly funny waiting for you in your inbox. Excited with your find and wanting to share the laughs with everyone you know, you reflexively click Forward. You then Cc: all the worthy friends from your address book, and click Send. Sound familiar?

So this little email publicly passes along every email address of every recipient to every subsequent recipient, for the duration of the email’s lifespan. For some emails this can be a very long time. An email harvester’s dream, you’re giving the gift of spam to everyone you know.

Bcc protects recipients from the harvesting of their email address and keeps email lists private. I’m begging you, please use it.

Whether it’s bayesian filtering, LOAF, or just pissing on your computer’s power supply – pretty much nothing is entirely effective at filtering spam. Obviously Bcc is a superficial bandage for ineffectual email spam filtering in general. I’m just trying to express the frustration of spending hours buried in spam moderation, while those most guilty of spam propogation are often sitting within our contact list.

Disclaimer: this is pretty much a knee-jerk response to periodically forwarded emails from friends and relatives who for some reason think I share their wacko neo-conservative views. So while commentary is welcome, it’s probably unnecessary.