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Admin
I've seen this before -- people who bcc themselves on most emails. Now that I think about it, I guess it was older folks mostly. Anyone know what's the logic behind this -- "I want to make sure it went through?"
Admin
"So, Email, if you're out there reading this, please change how your BCC functionality works."
That damn Email, what a bastard. I'm not really suprised by this.
Sometmies he just sends me stuff, all the way from Nigeria, that will never get to the right people since it's now in my inbox. It's bad enough he's all obsessed with "V1@gR&", but when there's money on the line, he just screws it all up.
He's also lazy as hell, what with that "Unable to deliver" nonsense half the time. You think he'd learn to google a few addresses to make sure they're typed in right.
Now I hear his cousin "Gmail", on the other hand, is a real class act.
Captcha: waffles. No I don't... well, maybe.
Admin
I suppose you could set up a daemon that, when Prof. McOlderton bcc's a message to it, sends him back a copy with the From: header mangled the way he wants. But do make sure it's firewalled from the outside world.
Admin
Okay, I'm sorry for posting the "first" comment. I'm really a steaming douche and there's no excuse for me being a total dipshit lamer. I should go play in traffic with people who think there's ever a good reason to post CAPTCHAs.
Admin
I do this, well a cc at least added as a rule, it is so I can file the mail and my response into a GTD supporting materials folder without having to click into the send folder (which makes me likely to lose my place while processing my mail).
I set the colour of the subject line in outlook to grey when so I can spot them for as needing filing.
Admin
I'm not so sure it's foolish. Well, OK, the header rewriting is kind of silly, but the idea of BCC'ing yourself is something I see quite a lot. It allows external proof (server logs, etc) that a message was sent, which may be more useful than simply showing that it's in a "Sent Items" folder.
Captcha: Darwin. Does that mean this wasn't intelligently designed? ;)
Admin
I've seen some programs where you can tell it to "CC to file" and it will save it in a special local folder. The term "CC to file" comes from memo-writing before email where the secretary or typist would make a carbon copy that immediately went into file, but you'd express that in the memo "headers" as if it were another person recieving the memo.
Admin
my (IT) project manager STILL thinks it stands for "cross copy". whatever the hell that means. i've heard him on the phone telling clients he's going to cross-copy them on an email. why are all IT project managers incompetent morons? cries
Admin
I had a boss (manager of computing department at a college) who would put "Re:" at the beginning of the subject line of EVERY email he sent out. I think he thought it meant "Regarding" but I would always get it and think he was replying to something I had sent. 2 years working for him and I never had the guts to tell him it made him seem ridiculous.
Admin
I also BCC me all my sent emails. You can set up Thunderbird very easy to do this. The reason why I do it is simple - I want to keep entire email discussions all at one place (see also "threaded view"). Except from that - this WTF is kinda lame. OK, so we know how email works, but I would say at least 95% of all email users don't.
Admin
Another one from the sidebar?
http://forums.worsethanfailure.com/forums/thread/118072.aspx
Admin
My wife odes it all the time and it bugs the hell out of me. She does it to keep her reponses mixed in with others responses in her inbox.
She also forgets where her keys are at least 5 times a week. Not suprising that she can't remember what she wrote five minutes ago.
Admin
The real WTF is the fact that the admin doesn't know how to use procmail.
Admin
On track with the adorable old professors coping with technology topic ...
One day while I was tech support for a university department, I get this call from a prof complaining that he can't click on the "Save" button on a dialog because it's off screen. I suggest that he try moving the window up by dragging the title bar. A few minutes later, he calls back and says it's still not working, so I walk over to his office and see the dialog with the button still hidden, but the window resized to be as tall as the screen. Apparently he did try to move the window, but I guess he saw the up-down cursor appear for vertical resize and thought it meant move up/down. I showed him the correct way, and now he thinks I'm a computer genius :), how adorable ...
Admin
I have an older boss who also BCCs himself on every email he sends. And to think, I always thought he was the only one. Weird.
Admin
I'm pretty sure you could do this with procmail.
Admin
In fairness, "RE:" does mean "Regarding:", as in "Regarding this email you sent me..."
Mmm...waffles with rofflesauce...
Admin
It does mean "Regarding". However, it is usually used in reponse to another letter or e-mail. If he had a meeting on that topic earlier, then it it would also make sense.
It may not have seemed ridiculous to his collegues. Think of the slang words that mean "good": "rad" (1980's), "fresh" (1990's), "def" (current?). They're only "cool" to the teenagers who use them.
Admin
Hmm. Although it's a stupid request, email can do what the professor wants on a protocol level. No client is written to do this, though.
Admin
Yeah, have him use thunderbird run regex over the mbox to do a search and replace with backrefs. Lemon squeezy.
(captcha was 'ewww' which may be the feeling produced by this profs request or what he calls the interweb, the e-www to deliver my e-mail)
Admin
You know, the reason he wanted it to show up as from the other professor was probably because he referenced (wanted to reference) the 'From' column in his email client to determine who an email was associated with (other than himself of course) without having to click on the message. I solved a similar problem for an older gentleman by showing him the magic of adding a "To" column to his Inbox display.
Admin
Admin
I did something similar. I was walking by his screen a couple days later and noticed that he enabled just about column header that Outlook offers. There were about 20 of them all crammed in.
Admin
One of the best wtf is to have a client bcc himself on an autoresponder set up from his Outlook on a Friday afternoon before he went on vacation for two weeks.
(read: how to send yourself "a lot" of email in a very short amount of time)
I had to call the DC and say: "Please suspend this account and we will deal with it on Monday or when someone gets back to his office"
Admin
Actually, it does mean regarding. It is a shorthand of the latin 'in re' which means 'with regard to'.
Some email programs automatically put the 're:' in front of the subject line when you respond to inform the recipient that the email is in regards to a previous email.
Your boss wasn't at all ridiculous for thinking that this was correct, however, you were a little ridiculous for assuming it meant 're'plying and keeping it to yourself and never mentioning it to him - you might have learned a bit of what it was like in the world when letter writing was the prevalent method of communication.
Admin
Admin
Most modern email servers are capable of detecting and preventing this condition.
The real WTF is that another posted believed one needs to use firebird to accomplish the task... Don't they teach kids how to use Office any more?
Addendum (2007-05-23 16:16): Sorry...Thunderbird... Excuse me
Admin
firebird? as in... the database?
you realize THUNDERbird is an email client?
on another note: procmail and formal can do it
while it's a stupid thing to do, BCCing yourself isn't. Think "threading".
Admin
Admin
You should count yourself lucky to have such a poetic wife, especially since you do not understand how email works.
That's why most people keep them in a keyboard. You really aren't up on technology are you? Eh, what do you expect from an 84 year old professor....
Admin
This is a classic case of what happens when you ask for help based on how you think the solution should work instead of just describing the problem. The problem that the professor wants to solve is that he wants to see the whole thread including his replies. You can do that with his current setup just by adding the "To" to the list of columns in his inbox (as noted by others). Alternately, you can use a mail client that supports that kind of thing, like Gmail. The problem isn't hard to solve, it's just that the professor asked for his solution, not A solution.
Admin
Admin
If he's using a private mail server and/or a standardized mail format, isn't it possible to use some form of scripting (I'm sure Outlook, for example, allows for VBS macros) to replace the fields that the professor wants to replace?
Admin
I do copy myself sent email via bcc. I never thought, people could think I am stupid or old because of that. As others before me mentioned, threaded view is your friend. You can track down a full thread without problems even months after sending the emails, especially useful after a "heated" discussion.
Thinking of it, people using the Sent Folder looked always suspicious to me. What do these people do with "old style" paper mail? Usually important letters to insurance companies etc are kept, do they file them in a different (real life) folder and think it's easier this way to keep them separated?
Another thought of those old-stylers still using usenet ;) Do you delete your answers locally from the threads? ;)
Admin
If "RE" stands is for "in regards to" and not "reply", then what does "FW" mean when I forward an email?
Admin
What the professor REALLY wants is a feature that I've only found on one email client, Mulberry. It's called the "smart address" column.
One of the preferences in Mulberry allows you to specify a list of email addresses to consider as yours. What the "smart address" column displays is the "From" address, UNLESS that address is yours in which case it displays the "To" address. (There's also a little arrow icon at the left, the direction of which indicates whether the message is TO or FROM the address displayed.)
It is a wonderful feature for grouping messages to/from the same person together when browsing a mailbox.
Admin
Admin
Admin
Admin
I'll admit I've never figured out why some people I work with CC themselves on every single email to me. I guess I can understand the argument of having everything in your inbox, but to me it seems ridiculous to get a copy of the email you just sent, followed by a response by me which is going to have the history in the email anyway.
I just figured everyone used the Sent folder.
Admin
I think it is much more appropriate to specify which "age" a person is talking about. My chronological age is quite a bit different than my emotional age, and is also different from the age that I feel I am physically (which varies all over the place, depending on what I've been doing).
However, referring back to the original posting: I always wonder if I should be offended by people just assuming that someone's chronological age is a good determining factor for how much they know about computers. If I mentioned that I play World of Warcraft and build the computers which are used to play it, what assumptions would you be making about my age? If I mentioned that I built three computers for the use of my husband and I for playing such game, would you be surprised that I am female? And if I mentioned that they all have four SATA hard drives configured for RAID-10, would that give you some idea of my minimum level of expertise with computers?
Never mind. Just keep assuming that computers are only for the young males in society. I'll just sit here quietly, playing my two copies of WoW on my projection monitor and wide-screen LCD monitor.
See you in Outlands, boys . . .
Admin
So which one of you is going to fix email and rake the big bucks? Or did Gmail do it already?
--RA
Admin
Does Thunderbird's threaded view have an option where it can snatch your replies from your sent mail folder and show them in the thread? It shouldn't be hard to implement, as the replies should have the replied-to email's probably-unique identifier in the headers.
i.e., like GMail's interface.
This is one of the more annoying things I've found recently with email, having to skip to the sent mail folder to see replies I've sent. BCCing yourself in every email you send seems fairly reasonable to me for many reasons.
Admin
Don't forget your mother's maiden name.
Admin
I dont think that would be very secure. The anonymous nature of the intraweb makes that inherently dangerous
Admin
Admin
Okay, I will.
Admin
I use BCC-ing on my mail for a reason which is undoubtedly different from the professor's: I have two machines on which I do e-mail, and like to have a record of sent messages available. My mail client, the Mail program built into Mac OS X, lets me set up filters (unfortunately, it seems to require one per account) to move the incoming copies into the "Sent Mail" mailbox for the account, and displays them correctly. Granted, it means I waste some storage space, but it also means I can always see what I've sent to other people.
(I have, though, met someone who used self-BCCing as a tool for dealing with a faulty e-mail account. For some reason the account he used to notify his customers of orders ready for pickup wasn't sending mail about two thirds of the time. He discovered that the error was on the outgoing mail server -- which was not in his hands -- and that he could tell which messages were being eaten by BCCing himself. Don't know if it was ever fixed, but it was one of the big access providers doing this...)
Admin
Adopt me! Please!
;)
Admin
That's why I like the Spanish way of expressing age: I have 27 years.