Business Email Address Privacy Fail

Do you show a blatant disregard for your contact’s privacy? For example, do you send emails with arm’s-length email addresses visible in the To or Cc field?

Let’s use this analogy…

This is conducive to taking your contact’s phone number and giving it to strangers—strangers whom they don’t know.

Strangers who may use their phone number to contact them about something they are not interested in. Or worse yet, who may sell their phone number to telemarketing companies for the same purpose.

The same thing happens with email addresses every single day. We’ve all had this happen to us, and it’s not okay, particularly in business, where you are trying to promote trust and reliability.

Yet, we receive messages or forwarded emails from well-intentioned business contacts who list all the recipients in the To field, making those email addresses visible to others they have not met or do not know.

If you do this and think, ” No big deal,” it is a big deal. If the only thing all those addresses you are sending to have in common is you, you have breached your contacts’ privacy by publicizing their emails to people they don’t know.

When you do this, you are completely disregarding their privacy, not to mention displaying your lack of tech savvy for all to see. Trust lost.

Preventing Unnecessary Exposure

I get inquiries from business owners who have been receiving emails where their contacts are exposing their email addresses. There are two issues they ask me about:

As you can see, contacts do not appreciate their email addresses being made public without their permission. Then there are those that assume they can then spam those addresses because they are visible.

By not respecting your contacts’ privacy, you are, in fact, opening them up to additional unwanted emails. Could make someone wonder what else you don’t get when it comes to protecting your contacts’ privacy.

Whenever you send to a group of online users who do not know each other, put your email address in the To field. Then enter the additional addresses in the BCc field to protect their email addresses from unnecessary exposure.

Part of this problem is that the BCc is not readily visible in some email programs. Sometimes, it isn’t easy to find, and you have to search for the BCc option.

In my program, I can choose whether to make the BCc field visible—or not. However, for other software and Web-based sites, you may have to do some poking around.

Find the BCc and Use It

The BCc feature should be used when emailing a group of contacts who don’t know each other. You don’t want to publish email addresses without permission.

Show you “get it” and respect your contact’s privacy! Wherever BCc may hide, find, and use it!