Should I 'bcc' or better to generate 100's of separate emails

  • Thread starter Thread starter Alan
  • Start date Start date
A

Alan

Hi All,

I am looking at writing code that will auto generate emails to 100s of
addresses from a list of a few 1000 each weekend (status updates).

There are currently 6 possible emails (statuses) that could be
generated (that may increase but not beyond, say, 10).

Am I better generating, say, 200 separate emails and sending them
separately, or should I create 6 emails and 'bcc' each one to the
group to which it applies?

If I 'bcc' a group, then how secure is that in terms of hiding email
addresses from other recipients?

For that matter, how does 'bcc' actually work? Does each destination
server actually receive the full envelope of emails, discard the ones
not for it's recipients, and then send on the ones it knows about?

If so, then presumably someone at each destination server *could* if
they wanted, access all of the addresses both within and outside their
organisation that were included in the original 'bcc' list?

Hope that makes sense!

Thanks,

Alan.
 
Alan said:
If I 'bcc' a group, then how secure is that in terms of hiding email
addresses from other recipients?
Click to expand...

On this point -- theoretically, it's secure, but in practise there may be
possible information leakage, depending on how well-behaved the various
servers between sender and recipient are.

See ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2821.txt, section 7.2, for more
on that.

The advantage of sending one message with a big bcc: list is speed (only
one message to send) and storage (only one message in the 'sent items'
folder, and on the source server -- once it leaves there and starts to get
re-routed to the recipients it'll get split up appropriately, but that's
not your problem any more).

-- dan
 
Alan said:
If I 'bcc' a group, then how secure is that in terms of hiding email
addresses from other recipients?
Click to expand...

On this point -- theoretically, it's secure, but in practise there may be
possible information leakage, depending on how well-behaved the various
servers between sender and recipient are.

See ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2821.txt, section 7.2, for more
on that.

The advantage of sending one message with a big bcc: list is speed (only
one message to send) and storage (only one message in the 'sent items'
folder, and on the source server -- once it leaves there and starts to get
re-routed to the recipients it'll get split up appropriately, but that's
not your problem any more).

-- dan
 
Disadvantage: Message is more likely to be rejected by a spam filter.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of
Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers
 
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