Email Etiquette and the BCC field

Christopher Breen over at MacWorld.com had an interesting post today on email etiquette and using the BCC field. Well his post was actually a follow-up on another post he had earlier where he got lots of comments.

Today’s post is great because it explains where to find the BCC field in different email programs. While the previous post had lots of really good reasons why you should use the BCC field. I agree whole heartedly!

But the one thing missing, in both the posts & the comments that followed (or at least I didn’t see it mentioned); is when NOT to use it. Mainly when you have a lot of addresses you want to send to. General rule, and this isn’t hard & fast, is no more than 20 addresses in the TO, CC, or BCC fields. Why? Many ISP’s check incoming emails, looking to see how many addresses are in these fields. If they are over a threshold, they’re flagged as spam. Because Spammers will send out spam that way.

If your email is flagged as spam, then not only does that person not receive that email; no one who uses that ISP will get email from anyone at your nonprofit.

If you’re sending out email to more than 20ish (including distribution groups from Outlook), use an email service like Vertical Response instead. Want to find out more? Come to NPower’s eNewsletters for Nonprofits training or ask for a copy of the training workbook.