Take Back Your Electronic Social Life

If you've read my blog you probably know that I despise Facebook, and Twitter as well. I find the cross-contamination of information to be invasive and dangerous. So I'd like to offer a solution that might come as a surprise to everyone: good old email. Gmail to be exact.

There are some gems inside of your basic email toolbox that can allow you create your own social networking world that is more under your control than websites like Facebook. Let's dig in shall we? We're going to look at some basic features that many people still do not understand: attachments, CC's, BCC's, and Distribution Lists. Mastery of these email-based features can allow you to create a streamlined social networking world that doesn't leak information against your will.

If you use Gmail you can "attach" fairly big files to an email. You can even attach several files to a single email. Most commonly attached are photographs. By sharing photos using email attachments you can control who sees the image with a sense of respect and care.

Placing recipients into the To: field is an obvious thing to do, but that exposes some personal information that you might not want to be the source of. What about putting those names somewhere else instead? CC stands for carbon copy, and like the "To:" field all the recipients will still be seen by each other--eeew. But let's say you want to send an email and have NONE of the recipients see each others' email addresses? Simply place all recipients into the "BCC:" field, leaving "To:" and "CC:" completely empty. This is the "cool" way to send out emails to multiple recipients. No information is shared against anyone's will, no email addresses are exposed, and nobody really knows who got it. The next day you'll hear murmurs like "Did you get that poem he sent out?"

Once you have all your contacts in Gmail you can easily assign groups of them using a feature called, well, "Groups". This allows you to compose emails to various people in your life without having to always enter each and every email address. Certainly you don't want your family to see your email about your favorite porn sites, and your friends probably don't care that much about that picture of your grandmother blowing out birthday candles. Groups in Gmail solve this problem with ease.

No Facebook required.