Just don't. It's too risky. Instead, send the email and then forward the sent message to whoever you want to BCC. An accidental reply from a BCC'd address can, and has, lost jobs. Unless of course you're sending an informative to a group of people - and you don't want the ping pong match of "Please stop replying to all". (although it is fun to watch sometimes)Don't Ever BCC Someone!
Oh good point! That's when BCC's should be used. Also because it hides the identity of everyone else in the group, which is usually a good things in these instances. The marina my family's boat is in constantly has everyone (like 500+ people) in the "to" field. So far it's fine because no one replies to it, but it sucks when it's forwarded to me and I have to scroll through 500 "Person's Name <email address @ email .com>" to see the message. My mom enjoys it because she discovers people who have recently moved in to the marina or learns the last name of the annoying woman down the dock.
The Horrible Job lost a day because The Horrible Challenge Department fucked up. So The Horrible Boss decided to forward the department head email wherein department heads were told our off days went from Thursdays to Tuesdays and that they should forward the email on to their departments. To everyone. But she highlighted the TO: and not the message, thereby forwarding EVERYONE a list of EVERYONE's names. Then she sent a message to EVERYONE telling us to read the stuff below, but didn't actually attach any stuff below. Then she sent a blank message to EVERYONE. Then she finally sent EVERYONE the two line email that the eight department heads had gotten three hours previously, and had forwarded to everyone in their department two hours and 55 minutes previously. Then she forwarded it to EVERYONE AGAIN to make sure we'd received the email. It was like watching an elephant on an ice floe. Best part is that everyone on set knew about the change three hours before the meeting even happened. thankgodshedidn'ttextittous
This has caused email servers to fail and make national news. I have a script that delays internal emails with more than x recipients, sends me a note and lets me manually intervene to prevent stuff like this.
I think you will enjoy this: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/420oan/companywide_email_30000_employees_autoresponders/ Hehe.
That looks like a nightmare from the infrastructure side.
A group of individuals - yes! A mailing list - don't BCC I found the link I was thinking of (a cautionary tale): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5174419 While digging for that link I learned a new term.An email storm (also called a Reply Allpocalypse) is a sudden spike of Reply All messages on an email distribution list, usually caused by a controversial or misdirected message.