You know you’ve seen it before; somebody sends out a company-wide email (or email to a large diverse audience), and a couple people or small group of people start replying-all back to the email with info/jokes that is only relative to that small group of people, yet EVERYBODY on the original email list has to suffer their inbox filling up with what is essentially spam since it doesn’t pertain to them or is something they don’t care about.

A co-worker of mine made an ingenious off-hand comment to me one day of how to avoid this, and I’ve been using it ever since.  Simply place the email addresses of everybody that you are sending the email to in the BCC field (not the CC field), and in the TO field put your email address.  So everybody still gets the email, and they are easily able to reply back to you about it.  Note though, that the people you send the email to will not be able to see everyone else that you sent it to.

Obviously you might not want to use this ALL the time; there are some times when you want a group discussion to occur over email.  But for those other times, such as when sending a NWR email about the car you are selling, asking everyone what a good local restaurant near by is, collecting personal info from people, or sharing a handy program or trick you learnt about (such as this one ), this trick can save everybody frustration and avoid wasting their time.  Trust me, your coworkers will thank you; mine did