How to lose your privacy to sellers who deal in email addresses.

One day you get an email showing your name in a block of addresses in the TO: slot, at the beginning of an email message to a group. Members in the list could be drawn from divisions of your corporation such as Security, Information Technology, or even Employee Benefits. Or … a member of the group could be on a committee to promote the company picnic or from someone who belongs to your church.

Let's say the block of addresses is saved by one of the skulduggerous recipients (maybe you) and is sent to a spammer who buys one or more of the addresses for as much as five dollars each. That’s right, $5.00 apiece. Address lists are factored by spammers for the social and economic features of the folks on the list, especially if clever things can be inferred about the income or spending habits of the addressees. In fact, this data can sometimes be used to produce more costly “targeted” lists bought by spammers with bigger pockets.

And this is big business. Go to Google, for example, and look up “address lists for sale”.

How can you, a vulnerable but enterprising user of email, write to a bunch of friends without selling each of them out to spammers who lurk at the sidelines of the email system hoping to trap five-dollar names? You can, first, avoid putting your block of names in the “TO:” blank as you compose your email.

Instead, put your block of names in the “BCC:” (Blind Carbon Copies) space. That’s usually the third choice for copies on the form you use to compose an email on your computer. This way the folks in your list will each receive a copy of your message “blind”, that is, without knowing the names of everyone else on the list as discovered in the “TO:” box.

But wait. The email you’re writing has to be sent to someone in order to flow through the Internet postal system. Good point. Simply put your own valid email name in the “TO:” slot. This way you’ll get your own copy of the message to check out its effect.

Remember, putting a bunch of names in a TO: box makes the friends identified there vulnerable to loss of some privacy.