The age of "spam" and computer virus' is upon us. Please join in making it more difficult for spammers to harvest your e-mail address by using the BCC field when you send or forward e-mail. This brief tutorial on the BCC e-mail field explains how to send an e-mail without showing addresses, or how to hide the e-mail addresses in an e-mail.

My friends send me "stuff". And organizations I belong to send me "stuff". And mailing lists I am on send me "stuff". When you send people stuff you can send it in two distinct ways:

1. So that everyone can see everybody else's email address, and

2. So that everyone can't see everybody else's email address.

When you put the e-mail addresses in the "To" field or in the "CC" field, everyone can see everyone else's e-mail address. And, when you use the "BCC" field, the system hides the addresses of everyone else. The "BCC" field gets its name from "Blind Carbon Copy". "BCC" is a term that was originally used (back when dirt was a novelty and typewriters used carbon paper) to indicate a carbon copy that was being made but wasn't being acknowledged. It was a kind of "secret" copy, one that the addressee didn't know about.

Today, in internet email it has a different use. It is used to hide e-mail addresses so that you don't disclose everyone's e-mail address to everyone else.

Why should you hide the address of everyone else? Because when you don't those addresses can get forwarded all across the internet. When you send twenty of your friends an e-mail showing all twenty e-mail addresses and those people forward that e-mail to twenty of their friends, suddenly 400 people now have your friends' e-mail addresses.

These e-mail addresses remain in the email and many people don't edit them out. I once received an e-mail that had been forwarded and forwarded and I was able to harvest 278 e-mail addresses from that one email. Ever wonder how your e-mail address gets on those spam lists? This is one way.

Consider if every time your friend called their friend, they handed out your phone number to people who didn't know you. And then those people handed it out to people that they called. Or what if every time your friend wrote (through the mail) their friends, they handed out your snail mail address to people who didn't know you. And then those people handed it out to people that they wrote. This is what happens when people send your e-mail address to people who don't know you.

Are you writing 5 of your friends who all know each other? No problem. They all have each other's e-mail address anyway. You aren't disclosing anything. Are you in the office or in a business transaction. No problem.

However, the next time you open up that e-mail that was forwarded to you with a joke, motivational story, funny cartoon, or even with one of the ubiquitous virus alerts, look through that e-mail. See how many e-mail addresses you can see for people you do not know. And as you forward that e-mail across the internet to your friends sending those e-mail addresses to spammers, remember that you know how to hide your friends' addresses to protect them. When you write, remember that you can be spreading your friends' e-mail addresses all across the internet. Learn how to use BCC. And use it.

Some ISP's won't let you send only to BCC. If you try to send only to BCC and your ISP bounces your e-mail, you may need to put at least one address in the "To" field. Here is a trick: use your own address in the "To" field. You can either put your own address directly, or, if you want to be even more clever, create an address in your own address book to use. For example, you could create an address in your address book called "My Friends" and give that entry your own address. Then when you want to use the BCC, put "My Friends" in the "To" field and the real addresses in the BCC field. The e-mail will show up addressed to "My Friends". The other addresses will be hidden.

Encourage your friends who forward messages to you to use BCC so that your e-mail address is less likely to appear in other people's inboxes to be susceptible to being harvested. It also helps keep the e-mail free of the email addresses.

One more thing: The same goes when you "forward" e-mail. All of the people you send a forwarded e-mail to by placing their e-mail addresses in the "To:" area are now at risk if others in that list do the same thing. If anyone's computer on the list gets hacked, all those e-mail will will now be a part of the hacker's spam list. This is one of the main ways that computer virus' spread.

My suggestion is that if you forward e-mail, copy & paste the part you want to forward in a new e-mail, then put the e-mail addresses in the BBC area.

Yeah. . . I know. It takes a few minutes to do, but at least you are doing your part to stop spreading spam and computer virus'. Perhaps, you should consider whether you should even consider forwarding it at all. I forward a lot less e-mail now because of the time it takes to strip all the e-mail addresses out before I forward.

I started added the following to all e-mail that I forward recently:

"If you forward this message, PLEASE delete the forwarding history which includes MY e-mail address. Please only forward as a "blind carbon copy" (BCC) which keeps everyone's e-mail who forwarded it before from appearing in the e-mail. Erasing the history helps prevent spammers from mining addresses and viruses from being propagated. Thank you. Read: "A Brief Tutorial on the BCC e-mail Field" at: http://www.celebratelove.com/forwardtutorial.htm"

OR. . . post this cute image at the bottom of all e-mail you forward using the "blind carbon copy" (BCC) e-mail field:

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Larry James • CelebrateLove.com • P.O. Box 12695 • Scottsdale, AZ 85267-2695 480 998-9411 • Fax 480 998-2173 • 800 725-9223

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