Wish List: Copy Out feature (similar to BCC)

[David Boden]

Something that many business people do many times a day is respond to an
email that has been sent to a large number of groups and reduce the number of
names in the To: list. I normally BCC these groups in and put a comment at
the top of my email "I have BCC'd groups A B and C so that they will no
longer receive this email thread".

That does the job of telling the teams that they're no longer required to
take part in the discussion, but they at least get the email so they know
what's going on.

Alongside CC and BCC, it would be great to have a CO (Copy Out) which would
be used by expert users. The fact that teams have been copied out would be
*visible to everyone* reading the email. However, when Reply to All was
clicked, these teams that are on "Copy Out" wouldn't be part of the response.

The feature is also very useful when sending an email to 50 people. You want
all 50 people to know the other 49 people that the mail has been sent to, but
you don't want to allow them to hit "Reply to All" and respond to everyone.
You want questions just to come back to you. At the moment, the only way to
do that is to email them individually or put them all in BCC which doesn't
really do the job.

It seems like this feature would be a good differentiator for Outlook and
Exchange.

Regards,
Dave

 

[Roady [MVP]]

It is not possible to implement such a thing in any mail application as the
SMTP protocol doesn't support it.
As a workaround you could already predefine the "Reply To" for that message
to include all addresses that you want to have replied to.

 

[David Boden]

I'm sure the feature could be implemented using a combination of the Reply-To
header and, if required, sending 2 sets of emails from the client to the
server.

For an initial implementation, just setting the Reply-To field to everyone
except names on the Copy Out list would stop the recipient's Reply To All
feature replying to people on the Copy Out list.

The recipient's Outlook client could use the difference between the To: list
and the Reply-To header to ascertain which names have been marked for Copy
Out.

 

[David Boden]

Apologies for not reading your reply fully, I see you've already suggested
Reply-To in your post.

So, I guess what I'm requesting is the client-side Outlook feature to do
this. Outlook already allows you to change how your "From" email address will
appear in the Reply-To header. The feature I'm suggesting would allow further
manipulation of the Reply-To header from the compose mail window CO "Copy
Out" list of names.

 

[Roady [MVP]]

I'm not sure what you are saying here but basically you want the "Reply-To"
field visible in the message composing screen?
You can achieve this by creating a custom form.

Since your need is very specific I wouldn't give you much hope on seeing
this implemented any time soon but suggesting stands free of course.

 

[David Boden]

What I had in mind was that you'd still have the To: CC: and BCC: fields and
also a CO: field. The CO fields would be added to the To list *behind the
scenes* but would not be added to the Reply-To *behind the scenes*.

I wouldn't want the user to edit the Reply-To by hand as that would get
messy and confusing.

I accept that it's a pretty specific requirement, but the use cases that I
put forward in my original post definitely apply to a significant section of
the business world; where users are using email to track issues between
several groups within a company.

Thanks for your suggestion about the custom forms.