The Death of BCC 366
An anonymous reader writes "An interesting op-ed at NeoSmart discusses the demise of BCC in emails at the hands of Facebook and the like. It discusses how certain technologies that are slowly being supplanted by 'cooler' yet less effective alternatives have actually been spoiled for all, since they rely on a basic community-wide awareness regarding these technologies for them to work."
Re:Gonna miss that site (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good Riddance (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah. Political bullshit.
Or . . . you know, an extremely useful way to keep someone apprised of communications without actually including them in communications. Say, when you are perhaps communicating information to a client and want an engineer to be up to speed on what is being communicated to said client, but you don't want to unnecessarily directly involve said engineer to the point that the client would just start spamming the engineer directly or that the engineer would start getting copied on every single piece of future communication in the thread.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying BCC is dead because people use facebook is like saying SSH or FTP is dead, because my mom doesn't use either.
Re:So true (Score:3, Insightful)
cue the tech-savvy one asking why is she BCC'd on her valentine...
i think an email-merge would serve this purpose better.
but really... why would you want multiple girlfriends? it's hard enough finding one girl that's not insane let alone several
(oh, no i didn't!)
BCC? Borland??? (Score:4, Insightful)
It took reading the summary twice for me to realize this story wasn't about the Borland C Compiler [wikipedia.org]. I couldn't figure out what the hell Facebook had to do with the best cross-platform C compiler and library ever written.
I was actually just talking to my Domino admin the other day about BCC:. Every chance he gets, he reminds our users about it. Almost nobody knows what it is, can't imagine a use case, and thus fail to even try - until we give them a couple of good solid examples.
Huh? What? (Score:5, Insightful)
BCC was dead ages ago because nobody hardly ever learned to use it. It was dead before Facebook. It was dead before the large influx of spam. It was dead about the time Gopher came out.
Ever get a "chain forwarded" email with hundreds of email addresses of people you don't know?
That's because nobody uses BCC. Nobody ever learns how to trim FW: lines either. FFS, nobody ever learns to reply in-line with quotes. Replies are all top posted, mostly because of that crawling horror called Lotus Notes and that other crawling horror Exchange. Nobody ever learns how to trim replies either - a one line top posted reply to 10 screens of text or multiple forwards? Sure!
The death of BCC is not because of Facebook. The death of useful email features is because most people are unwilling to learn, rude, or stupid.
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BMO