E-mail courtesy
A quick note on courteous behaviour when sending e-mails, since I am getting more and more annoyed at some of the mails I keep receiving. My annoyance has mostly to do with incorrect usage of the different fields an e-mail message has.
To: The recipient(s) of your e-mail. Keep in mind that everyone who receives this mail will be able to read this list.
Cc: Carbon Copy : secondary recipients of your e-mail. Once again, everyone who receives it will be able to see this list.
These two fields are useful for discussion e-mails in which everyone need to be able to reply to everyone else (e.g. when setting up a meeting for your gaming group ;-) ) They are often used interchangeably.
Bcc: Blind Carbon Copy : additional recipients of your e-mail, only the recipients of your e-mail will not be able to read this list. If you are mailing several people who do not know each other, it is wise to put all recipients of the mail in this field (and put your own e-mail address in the To: field.
I don't know about you, but personally, I don't like my e-mail address to be distributed to a whole lot of people I don't know. This one is very useful for all those jokes that people keep forwarding - if I wanted to, I could start a very successful spam business since I think I have the address books of at least half my contacts right in my inbox ... all of them in the "To" field of forwarded jokes.
Hmm ... now there's a get-rich-quick scheme ...
Subject: The subject of your e-mail. It is important to enter something relevant here, as this often determines whether I read a mail now or in, say, 5 days, or even classify it as spam.
And just because it's interesting to know, there is also the Reply-To field : here you put the e-mail address to which replies should be sent, if it is different from the address you are mailing from.