Stop the spam
EARN $$$$ WITHOUT EVEN HAVING TO BREATH!!!!! FEELING HORNY TONITE???? YOU NEED FAMILY DENTAL COVERAGE NOW!!!!!Oh please, make it go away...
A letter of introduction to one of the unsung heroes of Internet privacy: the ‘Bcc’ field in your email program. As opposed to the ‘To’ or the ‘Cc’ fields, where we would normally place the addresses of the recipients of our email messages for public viewing, the Bcc field allows us to enter the same addresses, secure in the knowledge that recipients’ details will not be disclosed to others receiving the same email.
Bcc is short for ‘Blind Carbon Copy’
In the days of pen and paper when middle-managers lived like kings and geek glasses were a cheap and reliable NHS option rather than face-furniture for pushy marketing executives, Cc was the term used to indicate that a carbon copy of a
letter had been made.
The name following the letters Cc was the person to whom the letter was being copied. Everybody who received the letter knew who else it had been circulated to. Bcc, however, was used to indicate that a carbon copy of the letter had been made but that this was not being acknowledged to the main recipient(s) of the letter.
In other words, a secret copy was being circulated to undisclosed participants. This rather dubious practice has found a useful renaissance in Internet email, as it is now mostly used to protect the privacy of recipients of messages and circulars that have been distributed to large groups of people.
There is a very good reason for not disclosing your personal distribution list in an email message. If you send a message to a number of people who don't already know each other, or have each others’ contact details, you're effectively broadcasting other peoples' email addresses to strangers.This constitutes a violation of privacy and really isn’t a clever thing to do. On the day this article was written I received two separate emails.
One was from a colleague bearing a stern warning to me and 67 other unsuspecting souls of yet another bogus virus with enough satanic powers to do everything from wiping my hard drive and every hard drive I ever purchase in perpetuity, to circulating my embarrassing baby pictures across the Internet and recalibrating my freezer’s coolness setting so my cookie dough ice-cream turns to cookie-dough milk.
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Created: 19/02/2004 Updated: 19/02/2004
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