Too many in the To

A colleague has a policy with Sanlam and today received an email from a 'Consultant'. He says in his email "In our endeavours to communicate more effectively, we make use of electronic communication via e-mail." Unfortunately, he sent the email to over 850 email addresses, in the 'To:' field*. It may not yet be illegal which I thought a pathetic irony, but is it? So what's to do about it? Please leave a comment.

*I believe that some email programs don't show more than the first few addresses. Those that do, show how much more bandwidth and space is used in the header, than the message itself.

Maybe the answer is that if you work in a big company, to tell the mail administrator to set alarms if someone tries to send 'to' more than 20 recipients. Use a mailing list broker (Vanilla do good business providing enterprise grade list services and education to ensure these remain legitimate).