Does this increase the risk of spam?

krishna

I have always worked on the assumption that sending an email to lots of people without blind copying the recipients (i.e. where all recipients can see all email addresses) increases the risk of those email addresses being spammed. Is this actually the case? If so how? Or is the reason for blind copying recipients purely a data protection issue?

Krishna

Red_Rose_Exile

The reason for it is primarily a privacy issue. I mean, you wouldn't want your colleague to know that you had also told his boss, nor may you want to show everyone everybody's email addresses to whom you had sent an email

However, there is a potential security flaw in the BCC feature. According to the conventions of the SMTP protocol, all addresses, including BCC addresses, are included in every email as it is sent over the Internet. The BCC addresses are stripped off blind copy email only at the destination email server.

albertross_2

If your email address ends up on someone else's pc, and they get hit with malware that harvests email addresses, then you are more likely to get spammed, and become a psuedo spammer, and you will have no control over it, because it is someone else's pc that is sending the email as you.