A few months ago, I was asked about the possibility to suppress what email addresses an email had been sent to. The case was as follows: we needed to send out an invitation to a list of over 50 recipients, but didn’t necessarily want them to get everyone elses email address.
Simply put; there are two ways. The first one is rather obvious, and also rather time consuming. It involves sending a separate email to each recipient. Now, while it would solve our problem, it would take way, way, way too much time.
BCC to the rescue! Wikipedia defines BCC as:
In the context of correspondence, blind carbon copy (abbreviated Bcc:) refers to the practice of sending a message to multiple recipients in such a way that conceals individual email addresses from the complete list of recipients
All you need to do, then, is enter the email addresses you want to send the email to, in the BCC field of your email client, then send off the email. That’s it; job done!
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Posted by
razumny |
Categories:
E-mail | Tagged:
bcc,
email,
suppressing addresses |
If you’ve ever written a website in HTML, you are probably familiar with the MailTo-command, used to automatically start a new email message when the link is clicked. However, you can do so much more with the command. Here are some examples:
- Address message to multiple recipients
- Add entry in the “Subject” field
- Add entry in the “Copy To” or “CC” field
- Add entry in the “Blind Copy To” or “BCC” field
- Add entry in the “Body” field
Now, I’m sure you’re wondering how exactly we get the code to do this. Here’s how (click the link to see the effect):
Of course, you can also combine the effect:
A while back, an acquaintance of mine asked me to explain how email addresses work. Although the concepts are easy enough to understand, he’d never really “got it”, and so asked me for help.
Email addresses are built up from three parts; a recipient, a server and a top level domain node (TLD). The address is formatted much like this: recipient@server.tld. If this was an address for regular mail, it’d look like this:
Recipient
Server
TLD
It’s easiest to think of the server part of the address as the street name and number, and the TLD as the zip code.
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Posted by
razumny |
Categories:
E-mail | Tagged:
addresses,
email |
I post comments in many blogs, and for a while, I had a serious problem that whenever I posted my comment with my emailadress, I’d soon see a marked increase in spammail. This all really cleared up when I actually got my own top level domain, razumny.no, and here’s how:
Once the domain was up and running, I started setting up my email accounts. What I did was create one adress, and then set that up as a catch-all adress, so that anything ending it (at) razumny . no would go to my main adress. Once that was done, I started setting up adresses wherever I’d leave a comment, so that when I commented at RennyBA’s Terella, the adress would reflect that.
The point to all of this is elegant in its simplicity; whenever I get an email sent to one of the catch-all adresses, I see which one it is. The practical upshot of this is that if I see an increase in spam to a specific adress, I’ll just block that one adress. This way, I don’t have to set up loads and loads of adresses, and I still keep spam at an absolute minimum.
Another advantage to this setup is, of course, that whenever I spell my email address out to someone, it doesn’t really matter what they put in front of the @-sign, it’ll get to me.
I’ve been using email since 1998, and from the get-go I’ve been using various webmail-clients, in addition to locally installed clients such as Outlook Express (urg), Outlook (Yum-yum), Lotus Notes (Oh-so-bloated) and Thunderbird (Weighed, measured and found wanting). My first email address was a hotmail one, and although that specific incarnation of my online presence no longer exists, I still have a hotmail address.
In addition to my hotmail adress, I’ve got five other main emails, three personal and two professional. All in all, this is a whopping total of five. Two of my four personal addresses are hosted by traditional mail and web hosts, and normally speaking they’d be accessed using a locally installed email client. Not so with me, mine are forwarded to my non-hotmail webmail provider, GMail.
Now, you can like or dislike GMail, it doesn’t change the fact that GMail has garnered a large following, and I for one love the archiving system they’ve got, as I do tend to need old emails from time to time, and at times need to label emails with more than one label.
I’ve spent two years abroad, one in the South England town of Poole, and one all over Israel. Both places, email was a great way of communicating with family and friends back home. However, not having my own computer in England, and not wanting to risk my personal communication being spread for the winds in Israel, webmail was the perfect solution, for a few simple reasons:
•If you’ve got ‘net, you’ve got mail
•Read and reply to email when and where you can and want
•Read old emails at need
Nowadays, getting an email address costs nothing, you get loads of space, and it doesn’t take a lot of time to set up or learn how to use. Simply put; if you know how to use the web, you already have the tools to acquire and start using your very own email adress.
2008 STFU && RTFM