Protecting Your Friends From [Some] Spam

As an I.T. director, I often get asked questions like, "I keep getting these junk emails about [some subject]. Why am I getting these?" Clearly there are a number of people who don't know how spammers get email addresses, and that lack of knowledge is hurting them. Perhaps someday I'll write about how spammers get your email address, but a) that's not the focus of this post, b) a simple Google search provides a decent education on the topic.

In an unabashed act of selfishness, I'm going to tell my friends and family how they can help protect me from spam.

The more places an email address can be found, the more likely it is that a spammer will find and abuse it. Spammers can employ tactics to harvest email addresses in your address book, as well as email addresses in your email messages. It's common for viruses and worms to employ this tactic. So if my address is in your address book, or if you've ever sent email to me or received email from me, please be sure you're using virus protection. But with today's major email providers (Hotmail, Gmail, etc.) incorporating good antivirus measures in their programs, that advice may seem outdated and unnecessary. True enough. But there's one other thing you can do to protect my--er, your friends'--addresses.

If you've ever sent a message to a large number of people, you have probably used the To: field or the CC: field for your friends' addresses. When you do that, you're not only sharing your friends' email addresses with everybody else who received that email; you're also depositing all of those email addresses in all the recipients' mailboxes. As indicated above, that's a bad thing.

I'm not telling you to not send emails to a large number of people (although many people should cut down on the number of "forward this to all of your friends immediately" messages that they send). But there is something you can do to hide your friends' addresses from others--including spammers and viruses. Use the Bcc: field rather than the To: or Cc: fields. Let's say you're sending an email to 10 friends, here's what you do:

To: [yourself]
Cc: [Leave blank]
Bcc: [All of your recipients' addresses]

And there you have it--one of the best email etiquette tips that everybody should now. Now forward this to all your friends. ;-)