Anyone who sends bulk emails to customers knows the importance of the ‘BCC’ field. It means Blind Carbon Copy, when you use it, everyone who receives the email doesn’t see everyone else’s email address. However, occasionally, you get idiots who send emails in bulk, and forget to use the BCC field, or in some cases don’t even know what it means.

One such idiot was Sandra Wong of BD Recruitment, who last week emailed every SEO in the North West area touting for people looking for a job, and visibly cc’d everyone in. So, we could all see which companies they emailed, who they emailed and, in the case of this particular peice of spam, the replies from the not so happy recipients.

Sandra Wong, from BD Recruitment, sent the following spam email to me, and many others:

Hi

I’m just checking to see if you are looking for a new career opportunity at the moment.

If you’re not, and know of anybody with a similar skill set to yourself then please refer them to me because if they secure a position through us we will give you a £15 HMV voucher.

This offer will be running until the end of this year so please save this message in your email account because for example if you recommend just 3 friends who all secure positions with us that’s £45 of vouchers for yourself, the more you recommend the more likely they will secure positions and the more vouchers you will get as a result.

I deal with online marketing but if you know of anybody in the technical department i.e. web developers or creative i.e. web designers. Any referrals who secure jobs with these departments also guarantees you £15 worth of HMV vouchers per candidate placed.

I look forward to your reply.

Sandra Wong
Specialist Online Marketing Recruitment Consultant
BD Recruitment Ltd

Consequently, dozens of people replied and slated Sandra Wong for her error, and demanded that they be removed from BD Recruitment’s database. Myself included. I imagine that BD Recruitment made a lot of enemies because of this, and lost an awful lot of potential clients.

That is of course, IF they removed the people who requested it. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an email from BD Recruitment again soon, as anyone stupid enough to CC in their entire mailing list also would have the bad taste to email everyone again when they think the heat has died down.

Darren Jamieson

Darren Jamieson, aka MrDaz, is the Technical Director and co-founder of Engage Web and has been working online in a career spanning two decades. His first website was built in 1998 and is still live today.

    

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