Connections: Everyone Who’s Anyone

A friend sent an email to me and a slew of others this week, using Gmail, that warned against opening any email that might arrive from her Hotmail account, which had been hacked. I don’t know what can happen if you open a hacked email, and I don’t plan to find out, but I do know something about my friend that she hadn’t intended: the email addresses — and many of the names — of her friends, acquaintances, and business connections, some 350 of them. 

I’d been thinking about the information that is sometimes divulged unintentionally by email since June, when other friends invited me to their anniversary party. They didn’t realize, I am sure, that the names and addresses of everyone they were including arrived along with the invitation. There they were, on the “CC” line of the Apple Mail program.

Most of the guests were people I was delighted to see, and I already had some of their addresses. I thought about saving those I didn’t have, as potentially useful future contacts, but then reconsidered. What would Miss Manners say about taking advantage of someone else’s privacy goof? Of course, all these contacts are probably still floating around in my computer somewhere (and I just don’t know enough about technology to tap into them).

I do know enough about technology to have grasped the use of the “BCC” line, but just how you would BCC some 350 names and addresses boggles my mind a bit. I guess if someone held a gun to my head I’d be able to create a “group” in my Gmail address book, and use that, but so far I haven’t had the occasion.

Sometimes at The Star, I’ve received electronic press releases showing the name and address of every person or news outlet to which it was sent — quite a bonanza, when celebrities, moguls, and editors across the country were on the list. My journalistic curiosity is piqued, and I find myself examining these lists like Miss Marple. I admit I once forwarded a long media list received that way to the person responsible for sending out releases for the Choral Society of the Hamptons, of which I am a member. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. 

Then there was the party to which the hosts intentionally sent out five separate email invitations. Actually, the first and second were identical, one having been pasted into an email and the other sent through Paperless Post. But the third through fifth were unique, containing updates and tips, telling us what games were going to be played (golf), what to wear, that there were going to be two D.J.s, and adding a link to a hangover cure (Sprite) and others to taxi transportation. Each used assorted sizes and styles of type in coordinated shades of blue and turquoise. Talk about email virtuosity! 

To be frank, Chris and I were only on that guest list because the bash was going to be a noisy affair and, well, our property backs up on theirs. We laughed at the obvious fact that we had raised the median age of the invitees, but we went nevertheless and had a swell time. Naturally, these young party-throwers were computer whizzes, and the names and addresses of everyone else invited were nowhere to be seen.