- disclosing your entire email list in the TO: field on mass emails.

There are a few arguments that should sway you away from this awful practice:

• It disenfranchises your audience. When I see I’m just one of 200 emails, I feel like a number and I automatically begin prejudging the email and the one who sent the email. The message is certainly lost or tainted before it can even be read. With the proper tools readily available at our fingertips (in all email programs), it is frankly unprofessional to send a mass email exposing your entire email list.  It is tantamount to the practices of my grandmother’s forwarding group who sends me cute kitten photos and Maxine comics on a regular basis.
• It exposes your audience to unwanted spam. All a reader needs to do is hit “Reply All” on your email, and he now has access to your audience. For church email lists, you have not only provided an email list, but more specifically, a targeted, demographic email list. This is extremely valuable to marketers. If one of your users is a marketer or the email falls into the hands of a marketer via hack or snoop, it’s pretty much guaranteed someone down the line is going to go after your audience with a product or pitch. The more people you add to the TO: field, the more you expose your audience to third party communication.I recently contacted a church leader who exposed more than 200 emails on his list announcing a larch church-oriented music event. I explained the nuances of allowing others to have access to his audience. No sooner had I sent the reply, a singer who was on the list replied to all with an advertisement of his latest album and how to purchase it.  Case-in-point.
• It is a liability to you and your organization. No one can please everyone all the time. No matter who you are, there is someone who is disgruntled with your organization and your leadership style. There is a reason the Bible says bitterness is a “root”. You can’t see it on the surface, therefore you can never trust that everyone in your 200+ email list has the best intentions for your organization. When you disclose your email list, you in effect, are giving a microphone to those who are disgruntled with you or your organization.This is a very real scenario not only in church and organization splits, but also when an every day layman looks to get maximum broadcast and collateral damage when airing their grievances.

The Fix

It’s very simple. Use the Blink Carbon Copy or BCC: field when sending to multiple recipients. Place your own email in the TO: field.

A Better Fix

Use MailChimp to send one email to one person on your list until everyone on your list receives the email instead of sending one email to hundreds. Mailchimp is free to use for up to 1000 contacts and 6,000 emails per month.

Using a mailing list services gives you several benefits.

1. Credibility with your audience by allowing them to opt in/out of your emails.
2. Track each email so you know if it’s been opened and read
3. Gain new members via web form on your site
4. Better subscriber management
5. More stable email platform for mass mails than Outlook or web-based email.

There is really no excuse to continue using Outlook for mass emails (over ten or twenty people) when MailChimp is free for the taking.

Go to MailChimp

Here’s a quick tip I learned this week when accessing Gmail or Google Apps email accounts from multiple email clients using POP3. Say you have Outlook at home and the office and you want your email to be duplicated on both machines.  If you set it up with the default configuration, one Outlook will pull all the recent emails from the server and mark them as downloaded. When you get to your other Outlook install, it will not download any mail that’s already marked as downloaded. This can create quite a headache if you want both home and work to be synced.

The solution is pretty simple. Instead of typing your username/email into the login information, prefix it with the the handy little “recent:” filter. The proper syntax would be: recent:yourname@gmail.com This also works with Google Apps.  Your emails will start flowing like a river again in all of your clients. Be sure to check “Leave messages on server” on every account setup, otherwise the first client to download will also delete the emails on the server, and your other email clients won’t be able to download those messages at all.