Mailing List Management

It happened again this week: an event producer to whom I had given my email address sent out an announcement of their next event. But instead of using a mailing list management tool they copied and pasted all 100-odd mailing list addresses… into the TO: field of their Gmail message rather than BCC:. So I and every other person on their mailing list now have those 100-odd addresses in our email client!

Asided from having to scroll through them to reach the actual message, why is this anything other than mildly annoying?

– If anyone who received the message hits “reply all” (and may do that by default) can all end up in a looping flamewar as others reply all “Stop sending!” “Take me off this list!!” etc.

– All recipients whose inbox resides on their computer (i.e., they don’t only ever access email via a web browser) now have all of our addresses on their hard drive… which means if any of them get a computer virus that looks for email addresses to “harvest” (most viruses do not want to destroy your computer, but to take it over and use your data and internet connection to spam others) we all get even more spam as our addresses are added to lists for sale to spammers.

It’s particularly easy to forget to use BCC when using a Gmail account because the default Compose window now doesn’t give you a BCC field by default – you must click on a small link to open it. The event people use Gmail and did successfully use BCC previously.

Continue reading

Friday Faves 03-22-13 – Pre-Order Edition

[PSA: If you don’t want to read this all now, clicking on the Share button at the end of the post now gives you the option of sending it to your Kindle account!]

A couple of items I have pre-ordered or am in line get that might be of interest:

Automatic (I wonder how much they paid to get that domain name?!) is (pre) selling a small device that plugs into the link to your car’s computer (the one your mechanic uses to  diagnose why your Check Engine light is on) and connects to an app on your smartphone (iOS or Android) via Bluetooth. Combining the data from your car computer and GPS service on your phone it says it will

Continue reading

Transferring Files To Others

I’ve recently shown you how to share files among your various devices. But you probably will also want to share files to other people. While your first thought is probably to send them a file attached to an email, that is not always workable for several reasons, including:

  • the file is just too big for your or their email server’s limits (usually over 5 MB is problematic).
  • the file is of a type that their email server prohibits in order to avoid the delivery of a virus (usually files ending in .exe, and frequently in .zip)

If the intended recipient is someone you see in person, you can always put the files on a flash drive or burn to a CD or DVD and hand the device/disk to them. But in many cases the recipient is not local – what then?

Continue reading