When BCC Goes Wrong

Raise your hand if this ever happened to you: you are having a charged e-mail exchange with someone in the company and then all of a sudden a third person pops up on the thread and chimes in.

What just happened?  What the hell is this person doing here?  It turns out that your pen-pal has been putting other people in the BCC!

To you it feels like a betrayal or snitching.  Your first response is “why did you include ____ here without letting me know”, but you can’t really say that because you don’t want to make the new party feel like you’ve been hiding anything.

The worst thing is that the person doing the BCC is kind of embarrassed as well.  They don’t put people in BCC because they want to show who they are copying.

Of course the BCC’ed person didn’t mean to cause any harm either.  We are so busy nowadays that we just reply without diligently checking whether or not we are openly copied.

So I developed a great habit.  Never to BCC people unless I am hiding everyone for e-mail address privacy.  With a bunch of e-mail programs you can actually hide that evil field altogether.  BCC is a sneaky and creepy way to include  someone.  Save everyone the hassle and just use Forward.

CloudStock 2012 is happening tomorrow! Stop by my panel in Developer Theater!

Tomorrow I will have the pleasure of speaking at an amazing event – CloudStock 2012.

First of all I have a confessio - I love CloudStock. It’s an event for developers by developers. Moscone West is a great venue and the Force.com crew puts on an exciting show.

Part of the reason I love CloudStock is that it still maintains a “down to earth” vibe. You can approach organizers, ask questions in the developer theatre, and get help from developer advocates at companies like DocuSign, GitHub, Twilio, Amazon, Mashery, Heroku and, of course, Force.com. This is a general spirit of camaraderie among participants.

Through the years Dave Carroll and Nick Tran (the guys who created the Force.com developer community) have maintained an easy-going, approachable atmosphere that sets the tone for everything that happens at Cloudstock.

If you are around, please join me for an interactive panel on API design in the Developer Theatre at 5:30PM tomorrow. While we have some slides to kick off the conversation, we will make this a truly CloudStock type experience so that it is very interactive. You will be able to join the discussion with the folks who are helping DocuSign design the next generation of our REST AP – including Chuck Mortimore and Dave Carroll of salesforce.com, Neil Mansilla of Mashery, Jeff Douglas and Dave Messinger of Appirio/CloudSpokes, and Mike Leach of Facebook. We will be discussing the trade-offs and design considerations for DocuSign's eSignature REST API.

Time: 5:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.
Room: Developer Theater

Be sure to register for the event at: www.cloudstockevent.com
Also, to get a free developer sandbox with DocuSign, visit: www.docusign.com/devcenter