Reply All

[Marty]

I received an e-mail from a person who put her own address on the To
line and had the rest of the recipients as Bcc.

I did a Reply All and did not receive my reply and now wonder if any of
the other Bcc people received it.

What's going on?

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Marty wrote:

> I received an e-mail from a person who put her own address on the To
> line and had the rest of the recipients as Bcc.

That sounds like the proper way to send email to a group of strangers.

> I did a Reply All and did not receive my reply and now wonder if any of
> the other Bcc people received it.

Your Reply All would have only gone to the sender of that message (she in
the From and To fields).

> What's going on?

Nothing unusual is going on. If all the recipients were in the BCC field,
you will not be able to reply to them. Or even see them, for that matter.

How would you even know who was included in the BCC?

--
-bts
-This space for rent, but the price is high

[Peter Holsberg]

Marty has written on 2/16/2013 1:29 PM:

> I received an e-mail from a person who put her own address on the To
> line and had the rest of the recipients as Bcc.

How do you know that?

> I did a Reply All and did not receive my reply and now wonder if any of
> the other Bcc people received it.
>
> What's going on?

No, they didn't. The email you got did not contain any of the addresses
in the BLIND Carbon Copy list, so the reply went only to the original
sender.

I don't believe there's a way to do want you wanted to do.

[Mike Easter]

Marty wrote:
> I received an e-mail from a person who put her own address on the To
> line and had the rest of the recipients as Bcc.

That is proper netiquette. A mail to a number of people should not
expose the addresses of the various recipients to each other.

> I did a Reply All and did not receive my reply and now wonder if any of
> the other Bcc people received it.

Reply all will only go to the addresses in the From and Reply-To, which
is the address of the sender.

> What's going on?

You can't mail to all of the addressees that the sender put into the
BCC; that is by design.

IMO any group mailing is a form of a 'mailing list'. Mailing lists
should be treated very 'delicately' in that my name should not be put
into anyone's mailing list without my specific request to be put onto
that list and that request and permission is/ must be/ revocable by me
at any time.

The person who sent you the mail had a list and let us say that each and
every name on that list had requested or wanted to be sent an email by
that person who sent it to you.

That does not mean that each and every person besides you who received
that email *also* wanted to be emailed something by/from you whenever
you felt like it. They did not give you that permission, nor did they
give that permission to any other people who you might put into your
list for mailing.

Think of it as some people do not want to receive any mail that they
didn't ask for and if they do, they consider it a form of spam, such as
'social' spam.


--
Mike Easter

[David E. Ross]

RFC 5322, Section 3.6.3 states:
> The "Bcc:" field (where the "Bcc" means "Blind Carbon Copy") contains
> addresses of recipients of the message whose addresses are not to be
> revealed to other recipients of the message. There are three ways in
> which the "Bcc:" field is used. In the first case, when a message
> containing a "Bcc:" field is prepared to be sent, the "Bcc:" line is
> removed even though all of the recipients (including those specified
> in the "Bcc:" field) are sent a copy of the message. In the second
> case, recipients specified in the "To:" and "Cc:" lines each are sent
> a copy of the message with the "Bcc:" line removed as above, but the
> recipients on the "Bcc:" line get a separate copy of the message
> containing a "Bcc:" line. (When there are multiple recipient
> addresses in the "Bcc:" field, some implementations actually send a
> separate copy of the message to each recipient with a "Bcc:"
> containing only the address of that particular recipient.) Finally,
> since a "Bcc:" field may contain no addresses, a "Bcc:" field can be
> sent without any addresses indicating to the recipients that blind
> copies were sent to someone. Which method to use with "Bcc:" fields
> is implementation dependent, but refer to the "Security
> Considerations" section of this document for a discussion of each.

Effectively, the whole idea of Bcc is to hide completely the recipients
listed for Bcc. Reply All only sends to the list of recipients for To
and Cc. In received E-mail messages, there is no list of Bcc recipients
for Thunderbird -- or any other E-mail application -- to use for Reply
All. I believe that implementing any of the three ways of handling the
Bcc capability -- as described in RFC 5322 -- belongs in the E-mail
application and not in the server for outgoing E-mail.

--
David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>

Are taxes too high in the U.S.? Check the bar graph
at <http://www.rossde.com/taxes/trickling.html> to see.

[Mike Easter]

Oops.

Mike Easter wrote:

> Reply all will only go to the addresses in the From and Reply-To, which
> is the address of the sender.

... and the addresses of other people in the To: if there should be
others; but in this case the premise was that only the sender appeared
in the To.


--
Mike Easter

[Marty]

Thank you all for the responses.

"That sounds like the proper way to send email to a group of strangers."

It's outside the scope of this thread, but it was a group of cousins,
not strangers.

"How would you even know who was included in the BCC?"

I wouldn't know, except the nature of the subject matter indicated a
number of recipients. At any rate, I obviously know there were Bcc
recipients since I received it without my name showing anywhere.

I may very well be mistaken, but I was thinking that Reply All went to
Bcc's in Outlook Express. Does anyone know for sure what OE did?

[Mike Easter]

Marty wrote:

> It's outside the scope of this thread, but it was a group of cousins,
> not strangers.

If you have the addresses of all of the cousins, you can email them, but
you don't know who was emailed and who wasn't.

As a matter of courtesy, when I send an email to a group of my friends,
I never put the addresses in the To or CC, but in the BCC; but I put
into the body the names not the addresses of those who received the mail.

I don't like to get a small group mail in which everyone knows eveeryone
else but To Undisclosed recipients or even the To being the address of
the sender without knowing who all were undisclosed.

If I were going to comment to a group of people about something, I would
like to know roughly who all received the missive I did.

> "How would you even know who was included in the BCC?"
>
> I wouldn't know, except the nature of the subject matter indicated a
> number of recipients. At any rate, I obviously know there were Bcc
> recipients since I received it without my name showing anywhere.
>
> I may very well be mistaken, but I was thinking that Reply All went to
> Bcc's in Outlook Express. Does anyone know for sure what OE did?

It did not. The recipient's mail doesn't know who was in the BCC so the
recipient cannot possibly reply to all of the recipients with OE or Tb
or any mail agent I know.



--
Mike Easter

[Marty]

Thanks for clearing that up Mike. For whatever reason, I was surprised
and disappointed to learn that my response wasn't seen by the others. On
the other hand, at my age, memory isn't improving and I obviously didn't
remember correctly what OE did or didn't do.

Marty

[Arivald]

W dniu 2013-02-16 19:37, Beauregard T. Shagnasty pisze:

> Marty wrote:
>
>> I received an e-mail from a person who put her own address on the To
>> line and had the rest of the recipients as Bcc.
>
> That sounds like the proper way to send email to a group of strangers.

Yes. But.... On receiving side there should be no BCC, because all
person in list should get only its own email address.

I thing mail was standard CC, but while replying TB (or extension)
change it to BCC for security reasons.

--
Arivald

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Arivald wrote:

> Beauregard T. Shagnasty pisze:
>> Marty wrote:
>>> I received an e-mail from a person who put her own address on the To
>>> line and had the rest of the recipients as Bcc.
>>
>> That sounds like the proper way to send email to a group of strangers.
>
> Yes. But.... On receiving side there should be no BCC, because all
> person in list should get only its own email address.

Yes. A received email will not have any BCC information; that's what
"Blind" means. You can't see any of the addresses the message was sent to
other than TO: and CC:. Depending on the construction by mail server you
may see your own address in an "Envelope-to:" or one of the "Received"
lines in the header.

> I thing mail was standard CC, but while replying TB (or extension)
> change it to BCC for security reasons.

If Thunderbird did that, it's wrong.