It’s annoying when a friend does it, but when a tech company that should know better (and have the resources to handle it) sends mail to nearly 500 people at once and lists them all in the ‘To’ field, it’s just plain unacceptable.

This morning I received my latest ‘Valleyschwag’ news update. To be perfectly honest I didn’t look at the header, until I received another mail from someone I’d never heard of:

Dear Valleyschwag support and the rest of the valleyschwag subscribers.

Have you guys never heard of blind copy.(its the one with Bcc on it) Can we now expect a raft of valleyschwag paypal phising. This is unacceptable.
regards

So I looked at the original message again to find my email address and some 464 others plainly listed for anyone to see.

Now I’d like to think that none of the Valleyschwag subscribers are spammers – but that’s not the point. Why oh why are VS sending out single open mails to their entire list?

The easiest solution is to use Blind Carbon Copy.

A more elegant solution is to use mailing list software to send individual emails to each person.

I’m sure this was just a slip-up on Valleyschwag’s part – trouble is it only takes one mistake and similarly it only takes 5 seconds to look at what email fields are filled in.

Brilliant eh?