Why bcc is bad

Whether it is for a work-related email or just an invitation sent out to family and friends, there is an easy way to prevent this headache. All you have to do is simply enter the names of some or all of your recipients in the BCC field before you send out your email. Using BCC is a great way to protect the privacy of both recipients and senders of email.

It is easy to remember, convenient to use and can ensure that your e-mail remains safe. To get even more out of your email experience, take Shift for a test drive today. I consent to receiving email marketing from Shift to this email address.

With gratitude, we live, work, and play on this beautiful land. Shift is not sponsored by or affiliated with Google, Inc. Gmail is a trademark of Google, Inc. Search Hit enter to search. Here are three situations where you should probably consider making use of the BCC feature: To Respect the Privacy of Your Recipients There will be times when you might have to send e-mail messages that contain potentially sensitive or personal addresses for the recipients.

To Keep the Correspondence to a Third Party a Secret Perhaps you need to keep one person in the loop, but you want to keep it on the down-low from another recipient. Share on Facebook Share this article on Facebook. Share on Twitter Share this article on Twitter. Share via Email Share this article via email. New team members find this to be refreshing, especially if they have endured the secret-handshake environments that still exist in many workplaces.

Concealing the true audience on an email chain runs counter to the idea of trust. When you add it to your own emails without a thought, it is like putting a glass against the door of the conversation. Once opened, it shatters trust. And if you require your team member to include you as a BCC, it demonstrates a lack of faith and causes that team member to feel inadequate to the task.

In a company where BCC is rampant, the recipient is forced to speculate about who is also reading the email and why the sender might bother concealing the identity of others.

It takes the focus away from the work at hand and leads to paranoid thinking, as well as well-justified questions about what is really going on. BCC sets up barriers to honest communication and hurts your opportunity to engage beyond the superficial. If the practice of BCC is an open secret, the other person is not likely to be candid — considering that some unknown party is reading an email sent to them.

And it introduces unnecessary complexity and intrigue , tangling up straightforward relationships. If you want a culture that is based on trust, honesty, and mutual respect, you need to root out practices that undermine it. Is BCC part of your modus operandi? If so, it may not seem like a big deal — perhaps even a necessary evil. But as more workplaces wake up to the need for transparency , many old-fashioned practices no longer make sense.

It is time to kick BCC into history, right alongside that authoritative style of communication. For you. In the digital age, the BCC seems at first like a godsend, as it allows you to surreptitiously loop someone in to a conversation without letting official recipients know anyone else is on the thread. That godsend turns hellish with the BCC'd one hits "reply all," sending a message to all those other recipients.

Embarrassment over your lack of discretion is assured; your job may be not. I think the worst use of the blind carbon copy is to rat out or tattle on a coworker. Say you're sending an e-mail to colleagues highlighting all that you've done on a project and castigating others for not doing their share; you BCC the boss as a way of claiming credit, but the boss inadvertently replies to all.

That'll sink any relationship between you and your colleagues in just one click. The more people on the e-mail, the worse things get, because everyone on the "To" and "CC" list will know you BCC'd a higher up. Having learned the hard way, I avoid using BCC altogether with one exception and urge you to, as well.