Basic Email Etiquette; move everybody from the CC to the BCC

Most people are receiving too much email. That is a fact.

One of the most annoying email features as far as I know is the CC field. I wish application builders would have supplied us with a few warnings for that one. Like “You are about to send this email with 700 people in the CC. Are you sure you want to do that?”

How much agony would that have saved over the years?

I know a manager at a large company who set-up a filter to just file away everything where he isn’t addressed in the TO field. His reasoning; 95% of all messages where I’m in the CC field can be safely ignored. The other 5% will email me personally (in the TO field) if I don’t reply soon enough.

Problem solved.

I don’t go that far but we do make it clear in our company that it really isn’t necessary to CC each other on everything. It saves everybody a lot of email.

There is one other simple thing you can do to help your co-workers be more efficient. As soon as you get an email addressed to a lot of people in the CC and you want to continue the conversation just do this:

Hi Ralph, nice to meet you (Boris moved to bcc).

That simple. You copy paste everybody from the CC field to the BCC field as a farewell message. You are basically saying ‘I’ve got it from here’.

I love getting those messages because I know I won’t be bothered with it anymore.

It is just basic email etiquette but apparently it needs to be said.

In fact, I think I’m going to email my whole address book about it…

…using the CC field.