Top 7 Office Pet Peeves - Reply All and BCC’ing (What?)
Yahoo’s Reuters article on Top 7 Office Pet Peeves (Yahoo story deleted/moved) quoted a guy commenting on this survey of top office pet peeves.
Two had to do with emailing, and as the author of an Email Etiquette eBook, I thought I would comment.
The first pet peeve was selecting “reply all” when that wasn’t needed. To me, if the email originally did need to get sent out to a group with public display of all addressees, then it would be common courtesy to reply to all IF on the same topic. The problem would arise when someone hits reply all to ask the original sender “oh, BTW, how’s your Aunt’s arthritis doing?
That’s just dumb and not thinking. Yes, and that translates into rude. But then again, that type of response shouldn’t be on the office email anyway, right?
The second office pet peeve had to do with BCC’ing. BCC is Blind Carbon Copy, where the recipient doesn’t know what other recipients there may or may not be. BCC is VERY APPROPRIATE and COURTEOUS in a wide variety of circumstances, although, usually, not inter-office.
This person was quoted, or perhaps misquoted, as saying that to use BCC was like standing up and shouting “Fire” in the middle of the building. What? Perhaps it’s a misquote.
The comment followed a statement that “no email is private”. I agree. And those who think email is private, especially corporate email, are terribly naive. I cover this also in my Email Etiquette eBook.
The eBook is still available for $9.95, but probably not for long.
I have also written articles about the appropriate use of BCC, check out Associated Content.
