How does using BCC help reduce spam?

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And if any e-mail says "forward this to everyone you know," don't.

BTW, sending chain mail is a violation of the terms of service of almost every ISP and web-mail service. If you get caught, you could lose your e-mail account.

i have been telling people this for years. i am going to forward this page to all those people today. your explanation is concise and to the point with easy to understand why and how to. thanks!

You are absolutely right about the collection of addresses that come with many forwarded mails,
but there is not even any need to fill in the To:line nor the CC line all addresses on the blind copy line will do,using Outlook Express.So no need even to send it to your self.
Joe

It's certainly the conventional wisdom these days that you should use BCC when sending to multiple recipients, but to play devil's advocate for a moment I'd like to point out that there are drawbacks. For instance, you sent several people an important e-mail, but can't remember whether you left certain addressees out. It's easy to reopen it in your sent folder and check, isn't it?

Not if you BCCed them! You won't see the blind copied recipients even in Outlook Express; I've tried, even using dodges found on the net which apparently worked in the past, but not now, at least on my system. So you'd better keep a list of those addressees somewhere else. Then I have to admit that there have been times when someone else has lifted my address from a list on a message, or I have found an acquaintance's in that way, and the resulting communications have been helpful. Everyone is so jealous of their privacy nowadays that finding people can be difficult, eg with most telephone numbers beung ex-directory. I am not convinced that the gains from this outweigh the losses.

I am also not convinced that spammers harvest their addresses in this way. It doesn't sound very practical. I have been sending and receiving e-mails with large numbers of addresses for years with no noticeable affect on my spam: I think the servers are quite good at filtering it now. So I think the question is arguable.

Not only should you remove the lines that are nothing more than forwarded email headers, the message would be much more readable were you to remove all of the > symbols.

In outlook express if you click on Tools, then Options, then the Send tab, uncheck the box 'Indent message on Reply' for both HTML settings and Text settings.

If, however, you use web mail, some web mail programs do not allow you to make any changes to the message being forwarded but send them as attachments after adding the indents and headers. (One more reason to use an POP e-mail instead of web mail.)

While the BCC addresses are definitely not included in the copies of the message sent by your email provider to the BCC addressees, they appear to be included in the original message as it travels from you to your email provider; that would seem to be necessary so that your email provider knows where to send the copies. So a spammer could still harvest the BCC addresses if your email is intercepted on the way from you to your email provider, although not on its way from there to the recipients.

Great tip...just goes to show....you can learn somethin new everyday, no matter how much you think you know...lol Of course I never forward anything, it's like a petpeeve to me.

Much easier way to do this. I just copy the the message and paste it in a new e mail with only the address's I want....to, CC or BCC

@ Bernard Winchester,
Yes, its harder to mfind who you BCC'd, but its possible. (In Outlook Express)
Find the email in 'Sent Items'
Right-click->properties
Then click on the 'Details' tab. They are all there easy to find.

Always use BCC is you send to multiple people unless you want them to know you have sent it to each other.

It doesn't seem to work this way if you use AOL..
I have told people how to send to Bcc, but if they have AOL, they can't do it!

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