Planning to send an e-mail to more than one person? If you enter all the recipients into the "To:" field, then each person can see the addresses of all the others. 

 

Instead, put those addresses into the message's "Bcc:" (Blind Carbon Copy) field to keep them private. Enter your own e-mail address in the "To:" field, and we'll all get a lot less junk mail (spam)! 

Apple's Mac Mail allows you to store frequently-used e-mail contacts, and optionally to organize them into Groups. When you create a New Message, you can retrieve those contacts by clicking on the Address button on the toolbar. 

 

An Address window then pops up with all your contacts, and after selecting one or more individuals or groups, two buttons marked "To:" and "Cc:" make it easy to copy those addresses to your message. But where's the "Bcc:" button? 

 

We've yet to find it, but the easy solution is to simply drag your selected contacts to the "Bcc:" field in your message. An annotated picture called BccGroup.pdf shows this process in action. After viewing the screen shot, your browser's Back button "<" will return you to this page.

Previous Meeting Topic: Security

On the Mac, "Tracking Cookies" are the main form of spyware. While several programs can block, scan for, or remove tracking cookies, the best approach is to set your browser to reject them, while still accepting normal cookies.

The basic strategy is to choose an option to accept only cookies placed by the site you are visiting. Since tracking cookies are generally placed by third-party websites, this will block most of them:

Safari Web browser: Go to the Security area in Preferences.

Firefox Web browser: Use the Preferences section, under Privacy.

Anti-spyware programs may also help, but none stand out yet as "must have" items. The most promising is Internet Cleanup from Smith Micro Software. This vendor also distributes the popular Stuffit utility.