Multiple Address Distributions

You put my email address on the To: line of an email. When you're
sending a message just to me or to me and common acquaintances ... this
is fine. But when you're sending email to me and people who I don't
know... put my name on the Bcc line of your email client. This is a
common courtesy. To put my email on the To: line of an email to people
who are strangers to me is the equivalent of including my address to
all the people who you are mailing Christmas cards to this year. Please
don't.

I hate spam. No, not the <sarcasm>delectable treat of jellied ham in a can</sarcasm>. The only way for me to reduce the amount of spam that I receive in my email box is to reduce the number of places that I allow my email address to appear. In part, I control that. I don't give my email address to people that I don't trust. That includes suspect websites and ordinary people. I should be able to choose who I give my email address to... but, if you're reading this, you likely gave my email address to someone else... perhaps without knowing what you were doing.

While the people who you are sharing my address with may not be bad people, they may not practice good computer security. If they don't, they could be opening themselves up to worms, viruses and other malware. In doing so, because my email address is on their computer because you sent it to them... I could become the victim of the malware attempting to re-propagate itself to my inbox or, worse, my email address could be logged to a botnet that is sending out spam. Such logging is the direct cause of a significant portion of all spam and can result in thousands of spam messages being sent to an email address each day.

So, if you're going to send me a mass email, put me on the bcc line. The 21st century version of Ms. Manners would be proud.