I am sure in the flood of wishes over the new year, quite a few of you would have received the wishes in the form of “BCC” email.  If yes, what was your reaction? Do you prefer receiving the wishes in the “BCC” ?

For some reason, I have not been a fan of either sending or receiving the wishes to your office colleagues in BCC. It just doesn’t feel right to me. I somehow feel it devaluates the wish and the person to whom you are wishing.

I know its more of the matter of convenience of sending everyone a wish in one single email without anyone knowing the final list of recipients. However, the convenience is for the sender than the recipient of the email.

There are some scenarios where you want to send email to a group of individuals where you do not want the recipients to see or know each other’s address or do a reply-all and start an email chain. Use of the BCC makes sense in such scenarios.

However, at times I have seen a manager using the team’s address in the BCC and sending wish emails to the team. This, to me, is utter silly and does not add value.  If you are anyways sending the email to the team using the team’s distribution list, why don’t just put that in the TO list and send the email?

If someone creates an outlook template (2 mins job) and tries to send the personalized wishes to everyone in the team, it would make everyone feel a lot better and feel bit more valued than receiving an email wish through BCC. Also, there are tools available in the market that would allow you to do so .. so why don’t just use them?

Any comments?