The Curse of Bcc:

One of the most misused features of any software around is probably the Bcc: feature on email. I think there's a few good reasons to use it. But there's lots of situations when you probably shouldn't be using it.

Being sneaky and sharing email with your buddy/colleague/boss using the Bcc: option is not a good reason and here's why. When someone is Bcc'ed it's clear that they were not expected to receive that email because they would have been on the To: or Cc: list otherwise. So in order for them to be able to take action on that email they would have to acknowledge that they received communication they were not supposed to, and that the sender was being sneaky. No one comes out looking good in this situation.

If I want to share some communication with another person not on the original list I just do a good ol' forward, along with my commentary. "John, here is the email thread. I have some concerns. etc." This way I am owning up to the fact that I explicitly forwarded the email and now the recipient has a clear way out to act on the email if needed.

There are a few situations where Bcc: is useful and possibly desirable.

When you have to drop someone from an email conversation I find it useful to move that person to the Bcc: while explicitly stating so, e.g. "Moving John to Bcc:" This allows the email thread and context to be retained, informs everyone who is going to be dropped, and is polite and nice.

Bcc: is also useful when sending email to mailing lists that have people who do a default Reply-All. We have all been through the time where someone sends out a "happy festival greetings" and then everyone follows with a reply-all and their contribution to upping the level of happiness and cheer. Within minutes you will have some one else asking to be unsubscribed from the mailing list, and then the rest of the herd follows. Comical at best and highly irritating at worst. Completely avoidable if the original person had sent it to his or her own email address and Bcc'ed the mailing list. (Ideally, avoid sending spam to mailing lists in the first place!)

In case you are not aware, the SMTP protocol allows you to specify a "Reply-To:" field in your email so that replies can go to a different email address. So you could still send to a mailing list and any replies to that would go to the email specified in the "Reply-To:" field rather than the "From:" field. Gmail does not allow you to set a Reply-To per email but you can set one for the account. Mail applications like Outlook allow you to specify the Reply-To field per email.