on mail listing your friends

Mail arrives from a friend, or at least somebody you know well enough to have them in your address book. But it isn’t to you, it’s a mass blast to everybody in their address book. And they didn’t even use a cc: list, they created a little mailing list. The return address is a person’s email, but you, you’re just a listing.

Ok, first off, this is rude.

Second, it makes the return email address useless. It used to signify an individual that you might correspond with, but now it means you’ve got junk mail, or at least bulk mail.

If you do this to me, it means that any personal mail you do send will either get auto deleted by my junk filter or it will get moved into the folder for noisy bulk mess that I rarely read.

But then again, I realize that people who do this are burning the personal friendship for the sake of a work project. When you join their bulk mailing list it means you’re dead to them but might be good for something after all.

6 thoughts on “on mail listing your friends

  1. By cc: I presume you mean bcc: — I get chuffed when somebody bulk cc’s me, I mean, I don’t want the whole world knowing my email address. It’s a matter of trust. I’ve trusted you with the ability to email me. You/Me.

    On a related topic, I was talking with a coworker recently, trying to figure out what the correct email to use is these days. I use a gmail account because at one time it was a little less average, features, etc. I’m not using my work email because that would be inappropriate for anything but work related issues, and I don’t want to spambait with it. ISP email is a sure sign that you may be dealing with a neophyte. What I want is to tell people where I twitter or use linkedIn, and have my email filtered through these channels. Completely. I was really impressed with facebook’s early use of your email domain to verify your network (.edu etc), and they appear to have dropped that completely. It’s too bad.

  2. But then again, I realize that people who do this are burning the personal friendship for the sake of a work project.
    Right up until that point I assumed you were talking obliquely about Bone…

  3. The thing about the personal cc: list is that you can never leave. People reply-all to use it, and requests to be removed have to be accomodated by every single person in the list. Which never works. So basically you are drafted in and can never leave.

    The personal bcc: list doesn’t have that problem because nobody can email everybody except the originator of the mail blast. But then it’s like having a megaphone in your ear because you can’t answer back.

    Luis, Bone’s thing was pretty quirky because it was so blatantly non-consensual. Nobody would ever have opted in, nobody could opt out, and Jeff used a variety of emails for his sender address so a filter to delete or file them all was a bitch to write.

    The one thing I’ll use either of these for is my immediate family. Since none of them are on speaking terms with one another I’ll use a bcc: when I have personal news to share.

    Piers, when you talk about filtering email through Twitter or LinkedIn, doesn’t it bug you to have your mailbox hostage to a transient account? What’s the benefit you have in mind?

  4. People who contact me through direct message don’t ever need to know my actual email address. I like this, but Twitter DM is clunky to say the least. I hate the fact that I had to let facebook scrape me when I joined, but I hooked up with a lot of good people because of this. Twitter and identi.ca didn’t need to do this, and I appreciate that.

    I would like a single easily accessible public web profile, that says “contact this person through facebook… contact this person through linkedin… contact this person through his current employer…” etc, to direct people who know me personally or professionally to the correct platform to contact me.

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