My friend Steve Robertson remarked today how so few people take any kind of care at all with their correspondents’ e-mail addresses. It’s not at all uncommon to get an e-mail with several (dozen) addresses attached, forwarded by a succession of people to all their friends, with no sign of conscious thought.

Well, Steve doesn’t appreciate that sort of thing, and I don’t either. I don’t like having my e-mail address floating around the Internet for just anyone to find. One of the favorite tricks of spammers, I’ve been told, is “mining” e-mail headers to get A-number one guaranteed good addresses. Even if that’s not true, I don’t necessarily want a bunch of your friends to know mine.

There is a simple way to avoid such indescretions. It does require a teensy bit of thought, and a couple of clicks. Tell you what, though: if you don’t value my privacy enough to exert yourself that much, please just take my address out of your book.

Every e-mail client and Webmail program I’ve ever seen has the ability to carbon copy (CC) and blind carbon copy (BCC) addresses. For this purpose, CCing is just as bad as forwarding, but BCC is another matter. What you do is select and copy the item you want to send out, and paste it into a fresh e-mail. That removes all the addresses from “before.” Then you click “BCC,” and then you insert the addresses you want to send to into the BCC field. (Some programs require you to have an address in the regular To: field. If that’s the case, send it to yourself.) Your message will go out to all the recipients, but without the other addresses. Some programs won’t even show the address of the recipient. In any case, no one will receive anyone else’s address. You may have to consult the help file of your particular mail program to get the details of blind copying, but - trust me - the info is there if you’ll look.

Trust me on something else, too. If you can’t be bothered to take that much trouble, the chances are about 99 out of a hundred that whatever you’re forwarding isn’t worth reading when it gets where it’s going. Save bandwidth and your friends’ patience, and just delete. After the first few times, it doesn’t hurt a bit.