Use Blind Carbons in Email
I am constantly getting group email from people that I know. By group email, I mean a message sent to a bunch of different people at the same time. Sometimes these mailings have useful information and sometimes not. What really bothers me, however, is when the addresses of all the recipients are listed in the “To” line. I often do not know many of these people. That means that my address is being displayed on a bunch of computers belonging to strangers. The worst part, however, is that sooner or later one of these strangers picks up a worm or Trojan and my address starts going out on phony infected email. I see evidence of this all the time. An address does not have to be in the address book of an infected machine for a worm to find it. Worms will look at all your stored email and a lot of other places for addresses.
When you do group mailings, PLEASE use the blind carbon copy (bcc) method. Any reasonable email program has a bcc line for addresses. When blind carbons are used, recipients of group mailings do not see each other’s names or addresses.