I hate spam. Actually, I don’t know anyone who enjoys receiving spam. And I know a couple of people who actually fell for those spam messages, thinking they came from someone legit. Or maybe because they were sent through an email address they’re familiar with. Probably because the owner of that email address didn’t know about the power of BCC or someone in their network was guilty.
BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy. If you’re using email to communicate with anyone, may it be at work or leisure, you must have seen this already. But, I know there are still a lot of people who have no idea what it’s for.
First, an introduction:
To, CC and BCC
When sending emails to people, you are given these 3 fields: To, CC and BCC. Here’s a brief explanation of what each does:
- “To:” field: This is where you put in the email of the person you’re directly addressing. Usually, this field is meant for one person only.
- “CC:” field: This is mostly used at work when you need to “copy” your boss or someone from your team when you send an email. Just like what the abbreviation means, it’s like giving them a carbon copy of a letter you’re addressing to someone else.
- “BCC:” field: This should be used when sending mass emails to multiple people. It’s called “blind carbon copy” because everyone else won’t see anyone else’s email addresses that were included or entered in the BCC field. You can actually enter all email addresses here and nothing on CC and To fields. Your email will still go through.
For web-based email users, the BCC field is not readily available. You have to click on a link first to reveal the BCC field. Here are examples with screenshots from Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail:
When and Why Should You Use BCC?
In case you still don’t know when and why you should use BCC when sending emails, here are a few things you should note:
- To prevent the spread of any email-related viruses, use BCC. You’re not only saving yourself from those annoying viruses, but it also shows you care about those who you’re emailing.
- When you use BCC, you’re also protecting all your contacts’ privacy. I know a lot of people who don’t want their email addresses given out without their permission, especially when it’s their personal email address. This is another way to prevent spam from spreading. And I didn’t mean spam sent by bots, but those that were sent by human beings that were paid to spam people.
- Not everyone appreciates it when someone replies to all, especially when it’s not necessary.
- If you’re sending an email to multiple email addresses, more often than not, you should put their email addresses in the BCC field. Keep that in mind next time you’re sending an email.
I use BCC whenever I send invites to fellow bloggers for an event I’m handling or when a PR asks for help. So, everything I’ve written here about the power of BCC is based on my experience. I do hope more people start using this, especially those who know my email addresses. I’ve been getting a ton of spam lately because of unwelcomed / unwanted mass emails where the sender didn’t bother using BCC. It’s now on a daily basis that I get emails about winning the lottery or raffle, verification of accounts from fake domains, etc.
Oh, one last thing: you can also use BCC when you want to show someone that you sent an email to a certain person without the recipient’s knowledge. I know you can think of a situation or two where this will be most helpful. 😉
The Makings of a Spam Comment : How Do You Deal with Them?
You spent hours upon hours conceptualizing about a post, actually writing it and making sure people will be interested. Once it was published, you promote it on your social accounts and patiently waited for the traffic to kick in, along with insightful comments you were expecting to get from readers. When you checked your email, you got a notification that someone already posted a comment on your blog. You hurriedly check and you see a comment awaiting your approval that looks something like this:
It may look like one innocent comment to you. The comment poster diligently made sure his / her comment was related to your post. It has a link to some site that’s also related to the topic of your post. You check it and it seemed decent. Is this a spam comment? And should you approve it or not?
To answer the first question, YES, that’s a spam comment. But, don’t get me wrong. Not all comments with links should be considered spam. There are legit ones left by people who just want to share more information about the topic of your post. So how can you tell it’s a spam comment? What other comments are considered spam and what should you do about them? Read on.
Annoying Comments
I remember receiving a comment on my blog post about our pet dog who passed away. I thought it was an innocent comment, ’til I checked the website the name of the poster was leading to – it was about funeral arrangements. I also remember thinking to myself if I should let it publish since the poster seemed to have read my post. Whoever left that comment deserves an Oscar, seriously. 😀 Besides, that blog of mine isn’t giving out do-follow links to comment posters.
What did I end up doing to that comment? I kept it and eventually approved it for posting. Now, before I go on explaining why, let me break down a few things that I’ve learned while reading about SEO:
I know this may be considered a sin for most bloggers to allow spam comments to be published on your blog, but hear me out. I do not approve all spam comments. I usually delete those that fall under the following categories:
If you have any other annoying comment ideas, share them at the comments section. 🙂
How to Deal with Spam Comments
I am using Disqus commenting system on almost al of my blogs (except this one). It uses Akismet to prevent spam so filtering is most effective.
For comments that fall under annoying comment #1, 2 and 3, I delete them right away. For comment #4, I actually keep them for future use. Since I’m using Disqus as my commenting system on most of my blogs (except this one), I’m able to delete links they post within the comment. But, those links on their names, I can’t change. I hope there’ll be a way for me to change this too on Disqus ’cause using WordPress comments, you can edit everything.
Why do I keep some of the well-written comments in the spam folder? When there isn’t much activity in my blog, I approve one of those spam comments just to keep my blog active. Again, this should be done sparingly as it can affect your ranking in the long run. I only do this on my personal blog and my other low-traffic blogs.
Why You Should Delete Spam Comments?
There are many reasons to delete spam comments. Here are a few of them:
In the end, we must all be responsible in keeping spam off our blogs or websites. Though we can’t stop spam no matter what we do, we shouldn’t let them win and reap benefits from the traffic and rankings we worked hard for.
Tell me, how do you deal with spam comments? Share your experiences below. 🙂