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Re: The Bcc Issue

2004-08-16 00:57:15

At 11.44 -0400 04-08-13, Nathaniel Borenstein wrote:
As one who has always despised the whole concept of bcc's, everything I say 
should be taken with a large grain of salt.  However...

Bcc actually has two functions:

(1) To hide recipients.

(2) To stop replies, i.e. working as a kind of "Non-Reply-To".

Most MUAs interpret "Reply-To" to mean "Send replies
intended for the originator of this message here", and thus
the common command "Reply-to-all" usually sends a reply to
all addresses in "To", "Cc" and "Bcc". But since non-Bcc
recipients will not see any "Bcc", their
reply-to-all-replies are not sent to "Bcc" recipients.

For example, I sometimes send a copy of a message I have
sent to my boss, but want to protect my boss from seeing
all future messages in a possibly long thread of future
discussion on an issue. To achieve this, I use "Bcc".

I thus do not actually want to hide the fact that my boss
is getting a copy, but I have to use "Bcc" to protect my
boss from getting a long thread of messages.

If IETF had standardized a new header "Group-Reply-To"
(similar to "Follow-Up-To" in Usenet News), and if all
mailers would by default use these names when people used
the "reply-to-all" command, this would have been better.
But, as many of us remember, IETF never could reach
consensus on "Group-Reply-To", and thus "Bcc" is needed to
achieve the effect described above.

Note: Some of you may say that it is the task for the
recipients, not for me, to decide whether my boss should
get a copy of their replies. However,most mail users just
use the "reply-to-all" command in their mailers, not
thinking of who the individual recipients of their reply
will be.
-- 
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/


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