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“CC”
and Spam
We have all received
those dreaded spam emails that are obvious marketing
letters sent to thousands or millions of people. We
hate to get them and are always aggravated if we see
two or three in our mailbox. Did you know, though, that
you might be contributing to the problem yourself every
time you send or forward an email to a group of people?
Email marketers buy
their mailing lists from any number of sources, including
entrepreneurs whose business is tracking down new addresses
for their lists. These individuals get them from any
number of sources, including receiving them from other
emails. You may say, “Yes, but I don’t ever
send my email address to anyone I don’t know,
and I never respond to spam, so they probably won’t
get my address.”
Wrong.
How many times have
you received an email from someone that has been forwarded
because they got it from someone else? This is most
common with jokes or stories that make the rounds of
the Internet. Take a look at some of them and you will
see that at the top of the page it usually lists numerous
email addresses for people you have never heard of.
That’s because the sender did a “CC”
email. He “carbon copied” the email to a
list of recipients, including you. Now every one of
those people has your email address and the email addresses
of everyone who got the email before you and at the
same time as you. If you send it on to ten people and
each of them send it on to ten people, then those people
each send to ten people, you have provided your email
address and everyone else’s to almost a thousand
people you don’t know! Any one of these people
can put you on innumerable mailing lists, filling your
email box with endless spam.
Now imagine contacting
a group of clients by CC…and one of them calls
you to say they don’t appreciate you sending their
email address to ten other clients. Potential trouble!
There is a simple way to avoid this and still save time
on your emails. You can send to any size group of people
without showing their addresses in the body of the mailing
simply by dropping down one line on your email screen
and adding the list to the “BCC” section
rather than CC. BCC stands for “blind carbon copy,”
and means that each recipient will get it without any
other addresses showing except the primary one. If you
want to protect everyone’s privacy, simply put
the list of clients in the BCC line, and your own email
address in the primary address line. This way, you will
get a copy of the email and no one will receive anyone
else’s address.
Spam is considered any
unsolicited commercial e-mail sent to a large group
of recipients, so you should always consider carefully
before sending to a large group of people. You do not
want to be considered a nuisance by your clients. In
addition, you are responsible for the safety and privacy
of any client information stored on your computer. If
you then take that address and send it in a CC email
notice to twenty other people or companies, your client
will have a valid reason to complain that you have violated
their privacy by giving out their address without their
permission.
The best solution if
you do a large number of bulk mailings to customers
or clients is to use a software package that is made
specifically for this purpose. These programs are designed
to import a large group of email addresses; merge them
onto a letter template, then send them out as individually
addressed letters. MaxBulk, Arial, and Broadc@st are
all bulk email programs that work well for businesses.
These will help you eliminate potential complaints and
provide each recipient with the impression that they
are being sent a one-to-one letter rather than a form
letter, which is always good for customer relations.
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