I’ve been using Vista’s Windows Mail (the re-born Outlook Express) on the computers where I don’t want to have Outlook 2007 installed, and in generally it’s a pretty decent mail solution. I’m using IMAP so my email is the same on all the computers. One important solution I had to configure was using FolderShare to synchronize the /contacts folder between all my PCs so each PC had the same contacts. I wish Microsoft acknowledged and provided solutions for multi-PC households – they seem to have their head stuck in the sand when it comes to that.
At any rate, I wanted to email a bunch of people today and like any good, rational person using email I wanted to use the Blind Caron Copy (BCC) field to protect the privacy of the people I was emailing, and to lessen the chance of it being blocked by spam filters. So I start clicking through the menus, and nowhere do I find a simple “View BCC”. What the hell? I looked through the options, and even tried the help file. There isn’t a single result for the terms “BCC” or “blind carbon copy” (in quotes). Who writes these help files?
I finally turned to an online search and discovered that in order to view the BCC field I had to click on “All Headers” under the View menu. That’s absolutely inane – why could you have a UI element that doesn’t include the keyword that the user is looking for? To quote Monty Python, someone should be sacked.
Isn’t this the same as Outlook Express? I can’t remember for sure, but I have some vague recollection about using bcc being a pain in it as well.
Yes, it’s the same – you’d think I would have remembered it, but it’s so horribly non-intuitive. 🙁
“At any rate, I wanted to email a bunch of people today and like any good, rational person using email I wanted to use the Blind Caron Copy (BCC) field to protect the privacy of the people I was emailing, and to lessen the chance of it being blocked by spam filters.”
I wish I could convince most of the people I know to use BCC.
Yeah, tell me about it Chris! I actually have a text macro I send to people regarding BCC…
“Could I ask a favour? When mass-mailing so many people, using the BCC field helps protect all of our email addresses from viruses. Most of viruses that send themselves out over email do so by scanning the email inside the Inbox and grabbing any email addresses that the virus can find. I’ve never published this email address on a Web site before, but I’m already getting viruses coming to me from people who get my address from indiscriminate CCing. Something to keep in mind for the future. :-)”