No Stupid Questions

I use BCC semi-frequently at work because it prevents all kinds of (mostly unintentional) annoyances from my coworkers. Mostly with automated emails related to reports and/or our case management system. BCC is your best friend when used selectively.

I just get users messaging me to ask “is this spam?” since there’s no one in the To: section or they weren’t in the CC or To section.

But I still do it to avoid this type of crap.

It is slightly the fault of the email clients for the sender that often don't show BCC by default. It probably would be reasonable for email clients to put a warning up if people are sending to a large number of people without using BCC.

People in my organization do this, and it's great. The only downside to that is when you want recipients to know exactly who else the email was sent to. Not super common, in my experience, but it does occur.

That means your mail admins sucked at their job.

I've pointed out that this issue could arrise so many times to companies with the all staff email. Every time they push back on wanting to define limited senders, "we don't think it's an issue/no one would do that!" Until someone sends an inappropriate email to the whole company, then it's suddenly IT's fault.

The correct response is to reply all when people start bitching. I can usually throw in an "unsubcribe" request in a separate email.

the admins should not be the ones convincing. Its the managers who have to wrangle behavior like that.

Wonder what the back end software is there. With Exchange reply-all storms are a thing of the past. I don’t have to convince anyone of anything to stop a reply all storm. Takes 2 minutes of setting up a transport rule. But the admin needs to be experienced enough to know that.

We brought on a man in his mid 50s. He knows the work and doesn't complain about long hard hours. The problem is he can barely work his iPhone let alone a laptop. I'm just a team lead so I don't need to deal with his computer shit really, but I learned quickly that I couldn't put him on group texts. He cannot tell the difference between a group text and a regular text.

"Don't know why you're asking me"

"You should talk to X about that"

"X" was in the group text as was his boss. After that I just took him off the group texts for the rest of the project and sent him need to know info separately.

This is correct. Any message sent to a group, should reply to the group by default.

Yeah for real, fuck SMS protocol for omitting basic quality of life features developed decades prior.

Yeah, I used to manage a Google account for a school district. I was able to disable the reply all for certain groups. My solution was to disable it for all groups except for one that I specifically created to allow it. The only members of that group had to be allowed in through a vote of our little tech committee which consisted of me and various upper level admins.

It worked quite well and it was hilarious listening to the students bitch that I had locked them out of one of the pranks they wanted to do.

Why? BCC is the solution and has been part of email since at least 1990. I'm not condoning a dogpile on OP, but this is a solved problem.