On Aug 9, 2005, at 8:06 PM, Rob McEwen wrote:
John Rudd mentioned:
(For all of you people who like to send a "undisclosed recipients"
message to all of your friends: yes, I'm calling you spammers, and I
am
unapologetic about it. If you don't like it, don't send me email.)
message for John Rudd,
Actually it is extremely more rude, inappropriate, amateurish, and
unprofessional to reveal everyone's e-mail addresses to ALL the
recipients.
It's not often that I tell someone that they're flat out wrong ...
usually I just say that I don't agree. But, that's not the case here.
You're flat out wrong.
For example, if my friend sends me a joke e-mail and he sends this to
all of
his other friends, I do NOT want my e-mail address so easily
accessible by
the others because my circle of friends may not be the exact same as
his.
If the sender doesn't take the time to know what each of the recipients
wants, and to accommodate what each recipient wants, the sender is the
one being rude and inappropriate. If one recipient doesn't want their
address publicized, then send them a separate mailing (and/or coerce
your mail software into splitting up the message into multiple
instances, one for each recipient).
If I'm one of your recipients, and there isn't an address in the to or
cc headers that represents me, then you're being rude to me. Period.
That is not up for debate. If you know me, then you know that that's
how I feel, and you're being rude if you don't address that. If you
don't know me, then you shouldn't assume, and you should just send me a
separate instance, otherwise you're being rude by pushing your
preference upon the recipient. (and, yes, the burden here is upon the
sender, not the recipient, because the sender can't force the recipient
to listen/read, therefore if the sender DOES want the recipient to
listen/read, they must accommodate the recipient's sense of rude/polite
and inappropraite/appropriate)
(and, really, you want to know what rude is? Rude is making it so that
I can't tell how I got this message, so that I know who to contact to
get off of that distribution list, because the sender may not even know
who I am if one of the places they sent email to was a mailing list ...
and yes, that HAS happened to me)
As for professional ... I don't know of any professional organization,
in my 20 years on the internet, that considers it professional behavior
to obfuscate the recipient list in a business message. That's for play
and cutesy things like family news letters. It is NOT good business
etiquette. In any organization I've been in, you would be laughed out
of the company for suggesting otherwise.
If you don't want to list everyone's address, then get them to join a
formal mailing list (or get their permission for you to put them on
one), and have the mailing list send them the message. Do NOT do
something cheesy and amateurish like "undisclosed-recipients:;".
