Duplicated Email, Duplicated Effort · Jan 27, 02:43 PM
I have heard much discussion around our office in the last few months about people receiving multiple copies of emails. In an audit of ourboard’s communications “poor netiquette” was cited as a problem and when we dug deeper into that issue we discovered that this was codefor the resentment and frustration generated by receiving the same email 2-3 times. Some of this problem revolves around people not understanding how the TO:, CC: and BCC: functions work in email and how they can help or hinder efficient email communication.
The TO: field is used when the addressee is required to action the contents of the email.
TO: Sean Heuchert
FROM: Director of Education
SUBJECT: New Policy
Sean – please make sure your staff are aware of the new cell phone policy
The CC: field is used when the addressee may be interested in something or needs to be aware of an issue that does not require action. The CC: allows users to see who the email was addressed to and see instantly who is required to act on the email (TO:) and who is simply being advised (CC:)
TO: All CUPE Staff
CC: All Principals and Managers
FROM: Human Resources
CUPE members – HR is looking forward to welcoming you to the Professional Development Day next week!
The BCC: field should ONLY be used when it is desirable to obscure who the email is sent to. The most common reason to use it is when you are sending an email with many addresses in it and you don’t want everyone to be able to see the other addresses. This is a good way to protect other people’s addresses. Here is the problem with BCC:, by design, it doesn’t let you see who got the message so it is tempting to forward it to other people because you may not be sure if they were included…DON’T! You should assume that if people were meant to see it, the author included them in the BCC list.
TO: Newsletter Mailing List
BCC: Sean Heuchert
FROM: Communications
Attached is the latest Communications Newsletter.
If I forward this to my colleagues/staff they may receive it twice…I can’t think of a single instance when it is appropriate to forward a message received by BCC…don’t do it.
— Sean Heuchert
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