C.C. Email Hazards
- C.C. = Carbon Copy
- B.C.C. = Blind Carbon Copy
I have recently been one of many recipients of group emails sent to SGF members, by other members, that were sent using CC. That means that I can read all of the names and email addresses of the other recipients. This is a security hazard and a privacy issue. There may well be some recipients on these lists who would rather not have everybody else see their email address in plain text, in a group list! Some may have even kept their Forum email account private from viewing on the forum, only to have it revealed in a group send.
There is another far more sinister concern about the use of CC as a means of sending group emails. My job here is to protect the interests of the membership and staff of the SFG from scammers, some of whom are also spammers. However, members who send email to groups of recipients are creating a security risk for every recipient on those CC lists.
It is a well known and publicized fact that there are tens of thousands of computer Worms and Trojans that infect hundreds of millions of computers, and that a huge number of these threats are coded to harvest email addresses from the infected email clients inboxes (and other email folders), address-books and html pages. These Worms search for the html codes that make up email addresses, collect them into CSV lists and send them home to their owners, who then sell them to spammers and scammers. When that happens the spammers and scammers gain fresh, active email accounts to send their crap to.
To protect yourself as the sender, and all of your group recipients from this type of threat, please do not send email via CC! Please use BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) instead.
Repeating my admonition:
DO NOT SEND GROUP EMAILS VIA C.C.
DO SEND GROUP EMAILS VIA B.C.C.
BCC does not display the names of any other recipients to anybody on the list. As far as they can tell they are the sole recipient. Furthermore, email harvesters cannot glean the addresses of any other recipients from this type of email. If one of the recipients does have an email harvester infection, only the sender is going to get added to the spammer's list. Too bad for the sender, but at least the other members are protected against this threat.
There are other threats that Worms and Trojans pose to email lists. Some of them send out spam from the infected computers to all of the email addresses they find in the infected computer email databases.
Please keep this in mind when you are about to send out the same message to multiple recipients. Practice Safe Hex and we'll all be better off!
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Bobby D. Hunter
Security for SGF
Hunting down Slimeball Game
Reporting member of SpamCop
[This message was edited by Bobby D. Hunter on 05 November 2005 at 01:39 PM.]
