A basic rule of e-mail etiquette

Someone sent me a group e-mail today, and I sent her this reply. I have sent many e-mails similar to this one over the years, but this time I decided to post it:

If you are sending an email to multiple recipients, you should not put their names and e-mail addresses in the cc line. That way everyone on the list is included by force in a group he doesn’t know (including you—I don’t know you); and, worse, if people reply to the e-mail, everyone on the list starts getting e-mails from people he doesn’t know, which is very annoying.

The addresses of the recipients should go in the bcc line, not the cc line. This is basic email etiquette.

Thank you.
Lawrence Auster

— end of initial entry —

LA writes:

In reply to my criticism and counsel, the author of the e-mail I had complained of writes:

Apologies. Please forgive.

See? If people began having standards, in apparently trivial things such as e-mail etiquette as well as large, and applying them, and firmly but politely calling on others to have standards and apply them, instead of, as now, having no standards,—or at least no standards that they will, as liberals put it, “impose on others” (oh, horrors), our society could begin to climb back from the ever-more hellish slippery slope it has been descending for the last fifty years. Or, depending on your point of view, the last eighty years (the beginning of the New Deal), or the last 224 years (the beginning of the French Revolution), or the last seven centuries (the beginning of nominalism, which is also the beginning of liberalism).

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 18, 2013 08:20 PM | Send