Following on from my article last month on the need to be aware of phishing and scams, this month I want to highlight the danger of sharing email addresses.

Bulk email mail-outs are a convenient method of communication for groups. Some emailers are aware of the BCC feature, which stands for Blind Carbon Copy and others are not. Whenever BCC is not used, all email recipients are having their address exposed. The importance of BCC is to protect email identity. BCC allows you to copy someone on an email without letting any of the other recipients know. It is a handy tool and it is also worth knowing more about to avoid mistakes. To make the BCC field available in Microsoft Outlook, in a new email message select the "Options" tab and then select the BCC under "Show Fields". This will make a BCC field available to you.

There are cases where you may want to "secretly" inform someone of an email message without everyone else knowing, however I recommend you use caution when using BCC. For example: If you send messages to a group of people, you may include one address in the To: field - the "main" recipient, and it may be appropriate to notify several others in using the CC field.

If any additional addresses are included in the BCC field, none of the other recipients will know. If a "To" or "CC" recipient selects "reply all", the BCC recipients will not be exposed. However, if the BCC recipient hits reply all, that user will expose themself (but not the other BCC recipients). This could be a problem in some cases. For example, recipients in the CC message may ask, “How did that person get involved in the matter?" A safer approach will be to forward the message to the intended "BCC" recipient, so if they reply, it only goes to you.

BCC should be used when sending a message to a group of people where it is inappropriate to divulge people’s email addresses, as people may find this an invasion of privacy. For example, if you send an email to a group of clients, you should put your own address in the "To" field and put all the other addresses in the "BCC" field.

In Outlook, when you look at your "Sent" messages in the preview panel, you will not see the BCC field which may make you wonder if you sent the email or not to the intended recipient. If you open the message, you will see the BCC field. Some people refer to the BCC field as "Blind Co-Conspirator", so think through how you want to use the BCC feature.

When things have gone wrong with an email dispatch, try to contain and mitigate the issue. You can consider the following if an incident occurs where an email puts contacts and personal information at risk of exposure:

1. What are the implications for the recipients knowing each other's email addresses?

2. Do all individuals affected by the breach suffer the same level of risk?

3. Is there anything you can do to put things right for individuals?

4. Be honest about what happened to those affected by the email. Consider reaching out to the recipients impacted and be clear about their rights.

You can recall an email. If you and the recipient are both using Microsoft, and are both on the same domain (e.g., @outlook.com, etc.), and they have yet to open the email, it can be recalled or replaced.

Ways to avoid email mishaps

Mistakes happen, but you can take a few proactive steps to avoid them. Never fill in the "To" field until your email has been proofread carefully.

Avoid late-night emails. Draft angry emails outside of email; if it still warrants sending, later on, word it carefully before sending.

Look into browser extensions supported by your email system to see if any recall options exist.

Anytime your message is taken the wrong way, accidentally sent or not, it is a good idea to give the person a call or, if possible, meet face-to-face to apologise. Offer to clarify and provide better context.

Ideally, we would prefer to avoid email mishaps entirely, but none of us are perfect. The best we can do when email blunders occur is to apologise, attempt to remedy the situation, and be graceful about the error. Many people are forgiving because they have made mistakes too. Remember this when you receive an email sent by mistake!