Email lists

Christmas is with us with all the environmental damage it causes. However, the admirable trend to forgo sending cards for friendly emails may be being offset by the generous use of the cc: button

While its nice to know that I am one of a long list of friends, I may not be so keen to have my address distributed to so many people I don't know. I have nothing against other peoples friends, just their computers. Who knows where they have been and if they practice safe email.

In our fight against spam, we should not send messages to long lists of cc:'s.

It only takes one machine compromised with some viral program (lots are picked up with apparently clean downloads) to have all the addresses posted to Russia and added to a spam database.
(I, on the other hand, knowing these to be quality addresses, will sell them for a good price to the Nigerians.)
The better and simple option is to use bcc:

Bcc: stands for blind carbon copy. Addresses on the bcc: list are not included in the header of the message (with the other to: and cc: names). In fact your own name is not included on the message sent to you, which is why messaged from mailing list quite often seem to only have one recipient, usually the person who sent it.

It should also be noted that long lists of recipients is one of the things that prompts spam filters to reject messages.

E-cards are also sources of addresses for spammers, as the e-card people are known to sell the lists of senders and recipients.

So Happy Christmas to everyone. I will send individual hand crafted massages to people on my list.