How To: Send a Bulk E-mail Considerately

If you send bulk e-mails (i.e. messages to several contacts), you really should be considerate of your recipients. While you know (hopefully) all of the contacts in the “To” list of the message you are about to send, there’s a good chance that all of them do not know each other.

A considerate bulk mail sender (that’s you), should respect your contacts’ privacy. Listing all of your receiving contacts in the “To” field reveals their e-mail addresses to each other. That could be thought of as plain rude! In addition, some of your friends and/or family will likely have an e-mail program that collects any addresses from incoming messages. That means, when they forward that wonderful e-mail to their entire address book, demanding that it be forwarded on to 15 others, everyone that you sent your message to will get that person’s bulk messages now. Very uncool!

Luckily, there is an extremely easy way to be respectful of your list of e-mail buddies.

To To, or to BCC

Instead of adding all the recipients of your choice message in the “To” field, add them to the “Bcc” field instead. Then, put your own e-mail address in the “To” field. Doing so, will prevent the recipients from seeing the e-mail addresses of each other. It will appear as if you sent the message to yourself to everyone.

A Step Further

The above technique can be taken a step further to add more polish/professionalism to your bulk mailings. Create a new contact in your e-mail program that is named “Undisclosed Recipients” with your e-mail address. After this simple step, you will still add your recipients to the “Bcc” field, but you can set the “To” field to the new contact.

The end result of this approach is the same. However, most of your recipients will see that the e-mail message was sent to “Undisclosed Recipients”. Believe it or not, this just feels more viable to most people.

Happy e-mailing!