E-mail: Bcc

Has junk mail infiltrated your e-mail box? Ever wondered how they get a hold of your address? Well one way is from the To: field and Cc: field in forwarded e-mail.

When you put e-mail addresses in the "To" or "Cc" field, everyone can see every e-mail address the message was sent to. So when you send twenty of your friends an e-mail showing all twenty e-mail addresses and those people forward that e-mail to twenty of their friends, suddenly 400 people now have your friends e-mail addresses.

In other words, you may be creating the junk mail you despise so much.

One way around this is to use the "bcc" field. The bcc field gets its name from "Blind Carbon Copy". "Bcc" is a term that was originally used to indicate a carbon copy was made but no one else knew. It was a kind of secret copy, one that the addressee didn't know about. The "bcc" field protects the privacy of the individual recipients of your e-mail.

Each of these recipient fields has it's own purpose:

•The To: field is meant to contain the addresses of the primary recipients, from whom you would expect a response.
•The Cc: field contains the addresses of recipients who you believe have an interest in the information.
•The Bcc: field contains the addresses of recipients you believe should not be disclosed to anyone else.

Next time you open up an e-mail that was forwarded to you with a joke or story, look through the addresses. See how many you can see for people you do not know. How far do you think they've traveled? How many machines across the globe do you think they are sitting on? As you forward that e-mail across the Internet to your friends, keep this in mind. You are sending addresses to places unknown and many of these are prospective junk mailers.

Another method of protection from junk mail is to block messages from a particular sender or domain. (The domain is the name following the @ in an e-mail address.)

Most e-mail programs can be set to automatically delete e-mails from addresses you select before you even see them. Microsoft's Outlook Express calls their feature "block sender". To use it, click on an unwanted message in the message-list pane, click on "Message" in your toolbar and select Block Sender. You will not receive any more e-mail from that person!

Almost all current e-mail programs have this feature, check with your provider and look through the help menu. If you use Outlook Express and do not see this feature, you will have to download a newer version of Internet Explorer. If you are not using Outlook Express, you will have to download a newer version of your program.

So, remember now to protect your friends' addresses by hiding them in your e-mails. And block those senders that annoy you … next, we'll have to get rid of those ads!