The younger generation reading these posts probably can’t relate to using a typewriter. But for those of us old enough, we may have some wonderful memories of pounding on those keys and hitting the return carriage. Those were the best of times and maybe the worst of times. How much white-out did we go through typing letter after letter? Oh, let’s not forget carbon paper! I can still recall trying to wash the carbon off my hands. Changing the ribbon is whole other nightmare to forget!

My sister was a legal secretary (Actually, she was the quintessential legal secretary.) whose first boss was tough, tough, tough. Nothing went out of his office that wasn’t 100% correct. I could be wrong (she’ll correct me in comments if I am) but I don’t believe he was a big fan of white-out and many letters were retyped because of one small error. The days of simply re-doing a letter on the screen and then reprinting it had yet to arrive.

You might be wondering why I’m talking about typewriters. Am I getting into the typewriter repair business? Of course not. However, I want to relate something that was very common in the typewriter world to our modern computing times.

Let’s go back to my sister’s legal office for a minute. If her boss wanted a letter sent out with a copy to another party, there’d be a carbon copy made while creating the original and at the bottom of the letter, there’d be a notation that a copy was being provided to another person or company and they would be named at the bottom. It would look something like this:

CC: John Grubb

On the other hand, if my sister’s boss wanted someone to get a copy of the letter without letting the original recipient or the person who got the carbon copy know about it, she’d make another copy. That was called a Blind Carbon Copy. It was exactly what these words state: it was made by using another piece of carbon; it was a copy of the original letter; and the other people were blind to the fact that this copy existed.

Let’s now take that typewriter knowledge and relate it to our computing skills. When you send an email, three fields are available: TO:, CC: and BCC:. These terms mean exactly the same thing regarding emails as they did in the old typewriter days. That brings us to one of my pet peeves and #1 rule when it comes to emails: Always use BCC: when you are sending to a group of people who don’t know each other. Plain and simple rule, isn’t it?

I’ve been preaching about this for years and many of my customers already abide by this rule. However, if you need a refresher or have no idea what I’m talking about, let me direct you to my BCC: help page which has been on my website forever. Just click HERE to read and review.