I have written to several of you about the problem of revealing other
people's email addresses by sending messages that display those
addresses in the "To" box or in the "Cc" (copy) box of your email. One
of the ways that this is inadvertently done, apparently, is by simply
hitting the reply button without paying attention to what that does.
Apparently, using reply on some systems will also send the message to
all those who received copies of the original message and those
address all are then revealed in the "Cc" box. This may happen only if
you hit the "reply all", not just the "reply" button, but in any case
one should be careful not to do it.
I have outlined the reasons for avoiding this practice in a brief
message which I keep on file and send to anyone who apparently is not
aware of the problem. I will repeat it below for anyone who does not
know what I am talking about. Anyone else who feels as I do is free to
copy my explanation and forward it to others who are revealing too
much information about other people's addresses.
(In an aside to this, the current example, where too many email
addresses are revealed, involves messages send to the USMA list and
then copied to several officers of the USMA. That really should not be
necessary in the first place. Those officers are subscribed to the
USMA list and don't need to get a separate copy.)
Regards,
Bill Hooper
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Form letter with a suggestion that I hope you will consider.
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Please do not send email to groups of people in such a way that
everyone's email addresses are shown, making them accessible to
everyone. It is very easy to avoid this.
One way is to select a preference in your email settings that tells
the computer not to display all the addresses when sending to a group.
If your computer cannot do this, the easiest alternative solution is
to put all the group's addresses in the Blind Copy ("Bcc") address box
instead of in the "To" box or the "Cc" box. (If your system requires
at least one regular address in the "To" box, address it to yourself.)
Doing this is important to prevent improper access to all our
addresses. Yes, it is true, that we trust everybody on our list, but
all it takes is for one person accidentally to forward the message
(with all our addresses) to someone else. Then the cat is out of the
bag. If that person forwards it to still another person (or worse yet,
to another group of people), and that person sends it on to still
someone else (or a group) the number of people who now have access to
our addresses multiplies rapidly into the hundreds. While we may trust
those in our original group, we cannot trust the hundreds of people
who may accidentally get our addresses this way. Some of them will
send it on to someone who will misuse it. It only takes one.
Thank you for reading my concerns. I hope you will understand and
agree that it is a good idea to do as I am suggesting.
Regards,
Bill
PS Please excuse the "form letter". I am sending this to all my
correspondents.
