Stop ‘Reply All’ Fiascos by Using BCC

Mark Morgan pointed out this reply-all fiasco at the State Department where people hitting “reply all” to e-mail messages sent out on huge distribution lists was causing problems for the State Department’s mail server. The State Department then circulated a memo threatening disciplinary actions if people continued to “reply all” to such messages.

Stupid.

The problem is not the end-user who hits “reply all” but rather the clueless sender who is including dozens or hundreds of e-mails in the CC or TO field. If you need to send a mass e-mail you need to be putting those e-mail addresses in the BCC field for a number of reasons.

First, it prevents the stupid but inevitable “reply all” messages. Hey, even I’ve accidentally hit reply all instead of just reply when responding to such mass e-mails. If the sender had bothered to take a few seconds to paste the addresses in the BCC field, it wouldn’t have mattered.

Second, in general when it comes to mass mailings I don’t need to know who else is receiving the mail. Oftentimes the result is that the recipient now has more information about who has specific authority or access to certain services than he or she really needs.

Hitting “reply all” to a mass e-mail is bad form, but it pales in comparison to sending out e-mails to dozens or hundreds of people that reveal all of those e-mail addresses in the To or CC field.

4 thoughts on “Stop ‘Reply All’ Fiascos by Using BCC”

  1. The Metafilter thread I got that from had some good ideas, too. BCC is sure on the top of the list.

    I love almost all of the Gmail Labs stuff – I just leave Gmail open now in a Prism window with several iGoogle sidebars in it – but they actually added “Reply to All by default” as a Labs option, which has to be the WORST idea they’ve come up with.

  2. I just discovered that Yahoo! mail at has a “Reply All” option for BCC emails as well. I tested this with my own set of emails in BCC, and used “Reply All” from a recipient email, and it replied to all the undisclosed recipients.

    So please beware that recipients can also “Reply All” to undisclosed recipients as well, and spread libel about your business or misuse your BCC list for spamming!

  3. @Joe Titus: I have never used Yahoo!’s email system. However,

    1. With BCC, the addresses aren’t sent in the email headers, so if Yahoo! has implemented email properly, this shouldn’t be possible.

    2. Yahoo! specifically claims this is not possible with its email system here.

    That said, if anyone was going to totally screw up such a basic aspect of email, it would be Yahoo!

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