It’s the holiday season again, with all that it entails. Besides the endless streams of Christmas music in every place of shopping there are other pitfalls to navigating whichever holiday you celebrate at this time of year. One of them is the endless array of email FWDs that arrive in your in box, lovingly posted by well meaning friends and relatives. You know the ones, “You’ve Just Been Hit By The First Snowball of the Season, Pass It On,” etc.

I’m not going to go on about sending me junk mail, but I do want to touch on something important here. Follow me on this one folks, it will be easy and simple and will make you a much better participant in this whole Internet thing. It’s called BCC.

Most FWDs I receive are sent to a rather sizable number of people. They are also mostly sent using the CC field of whatever email program is being used. This is not a good thing. CC stands for Carbon Copy. It allows you to send a copy of an email to multiple people. When you do this you are sharing everybody’s email address with everyone that is getting the email. Not good for privacy, and also something that can get some of your recipients pretty well bent out of shape. This is one way that people end up with a ton of junk mail.

Now no matter what email client (program that is) you are using there should be another field labeled BCC. That stands for Blind Carbon Copy. If you put everyone’s email addresses there instead no one’s email is visible to any of the recipients.

I have seen this basic error made so many times over the years, including in press releases and professional correspondence. On several occasions I have received press releases with literally hundreds of email addresses ready for harvesting were I unethical.

So this is my gift to all of you, BCC. Just do it!

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George “Loki” Williams is the owner of SocialGumbo, LLC