I have created in my Yahoo e-mail account a group list for the purpose of sending out summary information at various times. I would prefer that each recipient not receive the names and e-mail addresses of the entire group to which the message is sent. How do I do this?
A: The easiest fix is a tool built into most e-mail programs called BCC, which stands for blind carbon copy. The idea is that you create a mailing list with all the members’ names that can be copied and pasted into a BCC box, located just below the To box, where you normally type in e-mail addresses. Those in the BCC box will get a copy of the e-mail showing only their name as the recipient. They will not see who else got it.
There are two things to do. First, you need to set your e-mail software to allow BCC, and then you must copy and paste the group names into it. BCC often is hidden from view when an e-mail program first runs.
To find it in the e-mail module in Outlook Express, open a fresh message and then look for the item for View in the menu at top starting with File and Edit. In the View drop-down menu is an item called “All Headers.” Select this, and a line for BCC will be inserted below the regular To box.
In Outlook Express, you can use the built- in address book or just paste in the list of names using the Windows Select-Copy- Paste routine.
A lot of list users create a simple text file to hold all the addresses and then open that file and press Control + A to select all the names and then Control + C to copy them into memory. Then go to the e-mail message form and click inside the BCC box and press Control + V to paste them all into the line.
Since you mention Yahoo, you can find the BCC header by using the Add BCC option that appears to the right of the To box in the message window.
Q: I did something I didn’t want to do when I recently installed the Adobe Photoshop 4 program on my computer. Photoshop has taken over as the default program to open with many different kinds of files, including photos in the JPG, GIF and BMP formats. Maybe even worse, when I try to open one of Adobe’s own PDF files attached to an e-mail message, it comes up in Photoshop instead of in the Adobe Reader program that is far easier to use. Because Photoshop takes a long time to come up, trying to open picture files has become a nightmare.
A: The fix is fairly simple. Find an icon for each of these files types – a JPG photo, a GIF image and a PDF document. Give each of these icons a right-click, and it will pull up a menu that includes an Open With choice. Select that and you get a display showing the current program used to open it, and there will be a Choose Program button. Pick that and you will get a list of most of the programs on the machine that can handle such files.
