Today I want to boast about my weakness and ignorance about email etiquette. I made the mistake of adding all recipients to “To”, not knowing any better. But this can have serious consequences for the recipient’s privacy, and accounts can be blocked.
So I want to add a few lessons about email etiquette to prevent others from making the same mistakes:
When you send an email, you have three recipient options:
– “To” is used for the primary recipient of the email. This recipient is expected to reply or take action upon receiving the email.
– “CC” or “carbon copy.” Recipients are visible to everybody and will be included in “reply all” . Recipients in CC do not need to reply.
– “BCC,” or “blind carbon copy.” Nobody will see the recipients in BCC, and they won’t be included in future replies. Group members in BCC cannot see or contact each other. When a person in BCC “replies to all,” they will expose the fact that they were included in the correspondence. It’s the best choice when you’re emailing multiple recipients to protect their privacy.
When to use either “CC” or “BCC”
– Use CC when recipients must be able to contribute to the thread and be transparent about who is able to read and respond to the email.
– Use BCC when recipients need to be in the loop without exposing their involvement and do not need to reply, and to protect their privacy.
I hope this will help you to know the difference between “TO,” “CC,” and “BCC,” when you write your next email.
Thank you, Adina. May I ask if you could just record a short IOU YouTube video? I’ve read through this a few times, and wondering if it’s written for an engineer (by an engineer) but I am a fool so I know I need something easy to follow.
No doubt, this would need your Husband to do the IMPOSSIBLE because showing the list exposes the private emails—which is the main reason for knowing this.
Also, I’m not sure if this is just email etiquette. HLM to search, and I discovered:
Email privacy is derived from the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and is governed by the “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard. Ahhh, here’s our answer
“Although the accidental disclosure of recipients’ email addresses may sound trivial, under the PPIP Act, this could be considered an unlawful disclosure of personal information. An email address will often consist of a person’s name.”
I’ve accidentally done this at least twice and when we were emailing more in RRR@ we had a policy to LEAVE the SEND TO: blank and a supervisor added the single name and sent it as a precaution (and also to just confirm the reply).
I can see the blessing of boasting about our weaknesses! Thanks for sharing Adina, I have learned something new too.
Yes of course this helps Adina!! Thank you! I do know about this but this is really great clarification and we are not even taught this when we are in the secular working environment so I’m really impressed we are taught this here 🙌👏 This helps me have a better understanding of this… thank you for sharing and I believe like it says in God’s word we need to always be open to having a teachable heart ❤️