I want to maintain the privacy of members in a mailing list by populating the 'To' field with a name of my liking
No, I do not want to simply add it to BCC.
With Outlook I used to be able to have a list and tell it to display as "myfriends" or "monday meeting participants", not simply defaulted to "undisclosed recipients" (and this is not what Thunderbird does when you add it to BCC, the participants are just blank if you do that). And the participants display name ("myfriends") is independent of the mailing list name. I could have a mailing list called "my crap friends", "my average friends" and "my super friends", and each of them set it up so on the recipient's side, the participants will show as "mygreatfriends" so that they all feel good.
How do I do that with Thunderbird? If I forget to add the list as a BCC once, I compromise a lot of email addresses.
PS - I only have great friends :P
All Replies (5)
There is an add-on to help with the Bcc issue:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/use-bcc-instead/
but I don't think Thunderbird offers any way to use a display name in place of "undisclosed recipients".
A common recommendation is to put one real address in the To: box, to satisfy some servers which view empty To: fields as suspicious. If your email provider supports it, you could set up an alias address for yourself to use in the To: box, and of course, within the limitations of what can be used in an email address, this could be formulated to convey your fond feelings for your correspondents. In Thunderbird, you can usually add an alias as an additional identity to an existing email account. Gmail in particular supports the use of the '+' notation to generate throw-away addresses.
Be wary of systems that claim to show just display names; at some point in the process, the real addresses have to be given to the servers, so even when only nicknames or display names are shown, there is a possibility that the real addresses are visible in the message headers or source view. Microsoft's email clients are prone to suggesting that things are private when in truth there is just a weak layer of obfuscation.
sure we have mailing lists. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-create-and-use-mailing-lists-thunderbird
You can basically call them whatever you like. But here is the kicker. What is displayed to the recipient is not what you put in the list name. It will probably appear in your send solder as such. But that is about as far as it goes. I think you will find exactly the same occurs with Outlook.
Thanks people.
Zenos - your explanation makes sense. I will try the plugin, it indeed looks like it will solve the compromising info worry, and in turn using it will eliminate any concerns of weather or not email addresses are distributed as meta data even if a 'display name' is sent. What I also tested now is to then add my email address in the 'to' field. It does mean I get the mail I just sent, but then the 'correspondents' is not empty on the receiver's side.
Matt - thanks, I have however been using mailing lists in Thunderbird for a while, it is that kicker section that the question was dealing with ;)
Alright, let me go mail my friends and tell them how much I love them.
There is also the add on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/mail-merge that will create an individual mail for each recipient
Thanks Gnospen, that is also an option.