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Why we shouldn't send email to big lists of recipients![]()
Basically it's not a good idea to To: or even Cc: to long lists of recipients. The reason seems to be that bad bots out there are searching for such lists, capture the addresses and then feed them into spam or worse lists. Putting the names in a Bcc: list is said to be OK. When I asked our tame Webmaster, Hans-Georg Michna, why, he said:
If you want the friendly group to see who else is on the list, Hans says it's best to do a global replace of the @ with something else, like a © or the €. Reason: the bots search the body of the message as well. Hans, for example, is very thorough and replaces the @'s in his websites as well. In a follow-up response to the laments I have heard that doing all this is a huge pain, let me assure you that, depending on your mail client software, replying properly to a big list could be as few as half-dozen simple operations. In the offending mail: (1) click Reply All; You can then write and send the message to the same big list as bcc's. But, if you want also to let folks know who else was bcc'd, carry on with: (5) put your cursor in the message where you want the bcc list and paste again with <ctr>+v (assuming you haven't done another <ctr>+c in the meanwhile); I admit that the last step takes about half a dozen mouse-clicks or keystrokes in Mac Mail. If your mail software doesn't allow replacing in a selection (as opposed to the whole of the message) or doesn't do replacing at all (like Outlook Express) you may have to do the replacement in PC Notepad or Mac TextEdit. Again about half a dozen moves and clicks. No big deal, especially in the knowledge that you are fighting spam. |
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