Group Emails Sent With Every Address Visible

Two hundred addresses in the To line

A business has news: new prices, a holiday closure, a move across town. Someone opens Outlook, types the customer group into the To line and presses send.

Every customer on the list now has every other customer's name and email address. So does anyone they forward the message to.

Within the hour the replies start, some meant for the business and sent to everyone, some from people asking to leave a list they never knew they were on.

Nothing about this is unusual. Outlook makes it the easiest thing to do.

What every recipient can see

• Full names and addresses of everyone else on the list.
• Personal addresses that people gave to you and nobody else.
• Who else buys from you, including their own competitors.
• Every reply-all, with whatever the sender chose to say in it.
• Your whole list, ready to paste into someone else's address book.

The third is the one that matters most with business customers. A restaurant that can now see every other restaurant on your list has learned something you never meant to tell it.

Contact groups look private and are not

Much of the damage comes from a feature that seems designed to prevent it.

A contact group in Outlook appears as a single name in the To line, so the sender sees one tidy entry. When the message goes out, Outlook expands the group, and every recipient sees every address in it.

Distribution lists set up on the mail server can behave differently, which adds to the confusion. The safe assumption is that anything in To or CC is visible to everyone.

Reply-all does the rest

Once everyone can see everyone, reply-all turns the list into a group conversation nobody agreed to join.

One customer asks about an overdue invoice in front of two hundred people. Another replies to say please remove me, and five more do the same.

Each reply lands in every inbox and tells the list a little more about the people on it. The annoyance attaches to the business that started it.

Whose information it is

An email address attached to a name is personal information, given to your business for dealing with your business.

Showing it to two hundred strangers is a disclosure the customer never agreed to, and privacy law expects a business to protect what its customers give it.

For some businesses the list itself is sensitive. A clinic, a counsellor or a debt adviser that copies its clients into one message has told each of them who the others are.

Most recipients will shrug. The one who does not is the one you hear from.

A worked example

A family smokehouse in a farming town sells smoked salmon, sausage and jerky to about forty restaurants and delis, and gift boxes to retail customers before Christmas.

In February the owner sent the new wholesale price list from Outlook to a contact group called Trade. He saw one name in the To line. Each buyer saw forty.

By lunchtime a deli had replied to everyone about a short delivery, and a restaurant had replied to everyone with its standing order. Two buyers a block apart learned that they shared a supplier.

A short apology went to each buyer separately, and the BCC field was switched on in Outlook for good.

The next price list went out through a mailing service, one copy per buyer, from a trade list kept apart from the retail one.

BCC as the minimum

For a one-off note to people who do not know each other, blind copy is the least you should do.

Put your own address in To and everyone else in BCC. Each recipient sees only your address, and replies come to you alone.

Outlook hides the BCC field until you turn it on, from the Options tab of a new message. Once switched on, it stays on.

Check the To line before every group send. Autocomplete puts names wherever habit expects them.

Why regular mailings need more than BCC

BCC solves the visibility problem and nothing else.

Mail providers cap how many recipients one message can have and how many an account can send in a day.

Receiving servers may also treat a message with hundreds of hidden recipients as bulk mail, which can push your everyday email towards spam folders.

A promotional message needs a working unsubscribe under CASL, and your business carries the burden of showing that each person agreed to receive it.

A mailing service handles all of that. Each person gets their own copy, addressed to them alone, with an unsubscribe link that works automatically, and the service keeps a dated note of how each address joined the list.

Set it up to send as your own domain, with the records that prove the mail is really yours, so Gmail and other providers do not flag it as unverified.

If it has already happened

Outlook's recall feature works only within your own organisation's mail system, and only sometimes. Messages to customers on other providers cannot be pulled back.

Do not send a correction to the same list in the To line, which repeats the exposure. Send a short apology with everyone in BCC, or individually to anyone likely to mind.

Say plainly what happened, ask people not to reply to all, and say what has changed.

The counter-case

Visible addresses are sometimes right. A project team, a committee or the contractors on one job need to see and reply to each other, and BCC would get in the way.

The same goes for a small group who already know one another, such as the partners in a firm. And a business sending one note a year to six regulars can manage without a mailing service for now.

The rule is about people who do not know each other: BCC at minimum for anything sent to them, and a mailing service for anything regular.

Before the next announcement

1. Turn on the BCC field in Outlook today.
2. Put your own address in the To line.
3. Move contact groups into BCC, never To.
4. Keep trade and retail lists apart.
5. Move regular mailings to a mailing service.
6. Set the service up to send as your domain.
7. Send a test to yourself first.

Step three is the one that catches most businesses, because a contact group looks like one private name to the sender and arrives as a full list for everyone else.

The records that let a mailing service send as your domain are covered in the question mark Gmail puts next to unverified senders.

Frequently asked questions

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