July 7th 2006
The Best Way to Send Email to Multiple Recipients
Written by: Jerry Gartner
Typically, email based viruses and worms spread by scanning all files on the infected computer for email addresses. The virus then sends itself to all of the addresses that it finds. When we place multiple recipients in the ‘To:’ or ‘Cc:’ fields all of the recipients gain a larger profile to potential virus or worm exposure. Additionally, other malicious programs, including those that generate spam use a similar technique. Once an address is in a spam database, the amount of junk email that we receive in our inboxes can increase exponentially.
A good alternative to placing multiple recipients in the ‘To:’ field is to place your own email address in the ‘To:’ field and then place the multiple recipient addresses in the ‘Bcc:’ field. This Blind carbon copies (Bcc) the email to all of the people that you want to reach without exposing their email addresses to anyone else. This approach has several benefits:
- You get the email yourself so you can confirm that it went out
- You reduce potential exposure to viruses, worms, and other malware
- Some anti-spam algorithms mark multiple recipients in the ‘To’ and ‘Cc:’ fields as spam and therefore some of your intended readers may never see the message
- You keep confidential the identities of those recipients in your distribution list.
Topics: Security
