I try very hard to be respectful when sending bulk email to many recipients. Usually around a dozen or so recipients is when I start to consider these kinds of issues. One thing I really want to avoid is the dreaded “reply all cascade”. This happens when one person on the mailing list doesn’t like to material, and asks to be removed. They don’t reply to just the sender though. Instead they reply-all to everyone, asking to be removed from the distribution. Then someone else helpfully replies-all again, telling the previous person not to reply-all. The irony is lost on them, I suppose. This is when all hell breaks loose. Frustrated by so many pointless emails, more and more people start replying-all telling everyone else (again) not to reply-all. I have literally seen these things go on for days and involved dozens of exchanges.
All of this can be trivially avoided if the original sender uses “blind carbon copy” or “bcc” in the first place. This way nobody can reply all. The worst they can do is reply to the sender only. Problem solved.
Written 2019-09-26.
John DeHope 