I just sent the following email to virtually the entire who’s who of Durham:

I respectfully ask that all candidates, delegates, and interested parties refrain from mass-mailings in which all of the recipients’ email addresses are in the “To” field of the email. We may all have, in theory, access to this list, but it is not good practice to disclose such a list to such a large group. In this case, the genie is out of the bag, so to speak. However, the other downside to such emails is the potential for people to use “Reply-to-all”, either accidentally or in the heat of the moment, which will create headaches for everyone.

Instead, if you absolutely must address a large group such as this, make use of your email client’s “Bcc” field, which will render the recipient list invisible to everyone but yourself. You can certainly still indicate that you are making the whole group aware of your concern without explicitly publishing everyone’s email addresses in the “To” part of the email. (Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcc if this is an email feature you are not familiar with).

My comments are meant neither as a rebuttal nor an endorsement of any recent emails. I am simply asking well-intentioned people to slightly modify how they send out email communications.

And now I’ve got this sick feeling in my gut like I did yesterday…