Quite often we need to send the same email content to a number of different recipients and most people can manage to accomplish this task. There are genuine reasons for sending email in bulk quantities such as:
- You are a club secretary or administrator who regularly email meeting minutes, newsletters or notifications to members
- You have a regular marketing email that goes to a long list of clients or potential clients
- You keep contact with a number of family members via email
- You just want to broadcast an announcement to a group of people without the need to reproduce the content each time
There are a couple of things you need to be aware of when mass emailing and at the top of that list is the risk of running foul of spam legislation and second is the potential to be branded a spammer and have your IP address listed on some of the spam filtering black lists. The purpose of this article is not to educate you in those areas; you have a responsibility to ensure you are up to speed on those topics before you begin sending email. (Numerous commercial options are available for those wanting to send large volumes of email and those providers usually include facilities to handle the opt-in and opt-out requirements of the legislation, the staging of batch email and the formatting of content to produce a professional result. This article is intended for those who would normally send to less than 100 addresses.)
Why shouldn’t I just create an email and ‘cc’ it to everyone in my address book or a group of people in my address book?
A list of reasons not to do this could be quite long but here is the gist of it:
- some of your recipients may not like to see their address in the Cc bar of a mass mail out, especially when that email may be going to people they don’t know personally
- there are potential privacy issues with doing this that can have legal ramifications
- recipients with computers infected with malicious software could be a means of spreading those email addresses to other sources
- by essentially distributing lists of email addresses you are opening those addresses up to possible spam attacks
- you have no control over where your recipient could forward the contents of your email and therefore the email addresses of your recipients
How do I do it the right way?
It is really quite simple and is called the blind carbon copy or Bcc.
All modern email clients (programs such as Outlook Express, Outlook, Windows Mail etc) include an option to send email messages to an address or number of addresses by adding them to the ‘Bcc’ field of the address section of a composed email. Addresses added to the Bcc field are hidden from the recipient so that one recipient doesn’t see the addresses of the other recipients who are also receiving the email.
If you regularly need to send email to a group of recipients explore the features of your email client (program) to take advantage of options such as the ability to set up groups where you can add a selection of addresses from your address book to a group and then just send your newsletter to the group. You can then use your own address as the main address for the group, add this to the Bcc field of the newsletter and everyone receives a copy of the email without all the addresses attached.
That’s it – easy and simple – and you may stay friends with all those people receiving your email. If you need help settings things up you might find the links at the bottom of this article worth following.
P.S. If you don’t see the Bcc field when composing an email (usually directly beneath the Cc field) it may need to be selected for display in the ‘options’ or ‘view’ settings section of your email client.
Resources
Outlook Express Tips, Tricks and Secrets for Groups and Mailing Lists
