At Opendoor, there’s a healthy default towards transparency. While we are a Slack-heavy company, we still use email a good amount–especially for communicating with external parties. However, email and transparency aren’t something that goes hand-in-hand, unless you’re Stripe I II. Luckily, BCC can be used to build openness and keeping relevant internal parties in the loop when emailing external parties. I never really used to BCC or get BCC’d until I worked here but now it’s become indispensable. That being said, getting BCC’d or BCC’ing somebody has also become one of my biggest fears.
- What if I reply all??
- What if the person who I BCC’d doesn’t realize they’re bcc’d, and they reply all??
- What if the other people then realize that I was bcc’d and is now super confused??
Every once in a while my fear comes true…The case below: I bcc’d “C” but they ended up replying-all!
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Email clients should build BCC Protection that would reduce the chances of ending up in one of the above scenarios in two steps:
- Visual Cues: Callout being BCC’d on a particular email. Use a colour to clearly signal to the reader that,“yo friend, you’ve been bcc’d. please remember that”
- Confirmation on Send: Additionally, if the user attempts to reply to any additional parties apart from the email address that bcc’d them, throw the user a warning when they hit send. You might save a partnership or somebody some embarrassment.
We’ve already gotten used to this when the word attachment is mentioned but there are no attachments on the email…this would be a nice addition to that.
Note: I would usually send this note to my good friends at Polymail but I’m actively attempting to give them a break from my ramblings
Varadh 