Can I set a default of BCC for a mailing list ?
Hi, I am in England & I have a group mailing list for hirers of our local Village Hall. Recent European Union Law (called GDPR) now requires additional privacy & data protection for persons receiving emails from a mailing list.
To comply with EU Law I now need to separately change each (To) field to (BCC) before I can send a group email. I am concerned that I might accidentally miss a BCC change or accidentally delete an address whilst doing this.
As this Is now a legal requirement in Europe & the UK, is there any way of setting a default of BCC for a group mailing list ?
Chosen solution
Thank you sfhowes for the private messages giving additional advice. With your help I managed to get Use Bcc Instead, downloaded & working. I had to play around with the add-on's control panel options & read the instructions as it did not work in the way I expected.
One of the options is to set a maximum number of contact addresses before the add-on will recognise this as a group mailing & change all to Bcc. (I selected 3,) So if there are more than 3 contacts it will change them all to Bcc. The problem with this option is that you have to click SEND before it makes the change. I am not comfortable with trusting an add-on to do this every time. I want to see Bcc on the addresses BEFORE I click SEND.
I chose another option where it simply defaults all addresses to Bcc, (even single ones) as it does this BEFORE clicking SEND. Its easy enough to just change single address emails from Bcc to TO-, so that's the way I will go (if I can remember).
So this is SORT OF Resolved.
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There is an add-on, Use Bcc Instead, that has been updated to work with TB 60:
I downloaded this. I accepted the place where it wanted to download it to, as I am not technical & thought it must know where it should go. Not sure now where that was. I re-started & tried a group mail to see if it had worked but it did NOT default to Bcc I should have read the writers details fully because it seems to say it only works with Linux & I am using Windows 10.
There is a version of Use Bcc instead, on the main TB add-ons listings, but it says it will not work the latest TB version.
There are many ways to attain what you want.
One is to use the add-on
another is to use a pre addressed template
the one I prefer is the mail merge add-on. It removes the list from the equation by sending an individual mail to each of the list members.
So remove the existing add-on from Thunderbird and follow these instructions to add it again. You might want to have a look at the mail merge addon while you are adding things.
Chosen Solution
Thank you sfhowes for the private messages giving additional advice. With your help I managed to get Use Bcc Instead, downloaded & working. I had to play around with the add-on's control panel options & read the instructions as it did not work in the way I expected.
One of the options is to set a maximum number of contact addresses before the add-on will recognise this as a group mailing & change all to Bcc. (I selected 3,) So if there are more than 3 contacts it will change them all to Bcc. The problem with this option is that you have to click SEND before it makes the change. I am not comfortable with trusting an add-on to do this every time. I want to see Bcc on the addresses BEFORE I click SEND.
I chose another option where it simply defaults all addresses to Bcc, (even single ones) as it does this BEFORE clicking SEND. Its easy enough to just change single address emails from Bcc to TO-, so that's the way I will go (if I can remember).
So this is SORT OF Resolved.
Hi PaulMac I am not sure if and how you got it working now. Your last paragraph is exactly what I had before but unfortunately I needed to reinstall TB and lost it. I need this change exactly for the reason you mention. What I don't understand is that not hords of users seem to need this. EU law is very strict about it so in my humble opinion it should be a setup option of TB or even the defaullt as soon as you work with group mailings.