Closed Bug 310901 Opened 19 years ago Closed 16 years ago

More emphasis should be put on the use of BCC (privacy issues)

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

enhancement
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 271405

People

(Reporter: age.bosma, Assigned: mscott)

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050919 Firefox/1.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050919 Firefox/1.0.7

In addition to bug 226468, more emphasis should be put on the use of BCC. The
meaning of TO is clear and simple but a lot of users don't even know what BCC is
used for. Because of this, loads of mass e-mails just get send by using the TO
field which imo is an important privacy issue. People shouldn't publish someone
else's email address without them knowing about it. I think Thunderbird can and
should make a contribution in changing this behaviour.

First of all bug 226468 has to be fixed but in addition to this Thunderbird can
have a more informing role as well. The button could have a more descriptive
text or at least some additional explaination (by a tooltip or whatever), "Blind
Courtesy Copy" won't say much to a normal user. When an e-mail with multiple
addresses in the TO field is about to be send, Thunderbird could provide a
pop-up explaining the issues of using the TO field for a mass e-mail and
providing them an option to convert the addresses to the BCC field. This could
also already be done when a second TO address is added by the Contact bar (once
per session though).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Is there any other request except for adding a tooltip or an explanation about  the (unimplemented) Add to BCC button? If not, please re-summarize the bug accordingly.
I don't know what the best approach to this problem would be. The things I mentioned are only some idea's. It's not just about the 'Add to BCC' button.
QA Contact: message-compose
I think something like this would be a great feature. Perhaps someone can write an extension. Here is a draft version (sorry for my english) of an according warning dialog box.
"Do you like to change to BCC-Mode?
Respect the privacy of your recipients! You are about to send an E-Mail to xy E-mail-Adresses and everyone of your recipients would get the E-Mail-Adress of the other recipients. To prevent you from this mostly unwanted behavior, Thunderbird will change this and send this message bcc to all if you press [OK]. You can stop the sending process with [cancel] or force Thunderbird to disclose all addresses within your recipients with [no privacy]."
Perhaps it would be nice to set the allowed maximal number of disclosed adresses (to/cc-combination) in the properties of the extension.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 16 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.