If you’ve sent or received many emails, you probably already know about Cc when sending a message. It’s the place you put the email addresses of people you want to send copies of your email to. Cc stands for carbon copy. But do you know about Bcc? Bcc is short for “blind carbon copy”. A weird thing to do with an email maybe, but not really. It just means that the email addresses you put in the Bcc section of your message will not be seen by the recipients of the email. Sounds like a big deceptive device to secretly send copies of emails to friends but it really serves a legitimate purpose and one you should try to use if sending an email to a bunch of people.
When you forward that funny email you received that you just know everyone will love (but will they really?) to everyone in your address book, every person who receives that message now has the email address of every other person you sent it to. Then if one of the recipients of your email finds that funny and decides to forward it, they also get the addresses that you sent it to as they are usually included in the forward. And so on and so on until someone finds the email address of her ex-husband’s new girlfriend in an email and things get ugly. Or maybe one of the recipients of your email has a virus that sends out email on his computer . Now, that virus has all the addresses of your contacts and can use their addresses for its evil purposes. There are many reasons not to show the addresses of multiple recipients of emails, but mostly it’s just good netiquette. Adding the names to Bcc is as simple as adding them to the Cc section but the problem is, some email software doesn’t show you the Bcc section and you have to do a bit of work to see it.
If you use Microsoft Windows Mail for Vista or the older Microsoft Outlook Express, you can turn on Bcc by opening a new message then go to the “View” menu and select “All Headers”.
If you use Microsoft’s Outlook, there are different ways of showing Bcc, depending on your version. Microsoft can show you how here. If you use another email software, google “show bcc” and the name of your software.
Now, just like with Cc, you can add your email addresses, separated by commas. In the To section of your message you can put your own email address or you can set up a new contact in your email, with your email address, and call it “Undisclosed recipients”. Then send your message to Undisclosed recipients and Bcc it to everyone else.
Of course, you don’t need to use Bcc every time you send an email to multiple recipients. Sometimes, especially in business, you may want the CEO to know that the email you’re sending her has also gone to the local newspaper and the union president or you may want Mom to know that you are sending this email to your aunt and she doesn’t need to forward it to her (even though you know she will anyway).
March 9th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Oh, I learned about this SO the hard way. I sent out a mass email to a bunch of people, most of whom had no connection with each other, to get story ideas for a writing project. One of the people who received my email put everyone on my email, on HIS newsletter email list, severely annoying a couple of people. Now I always use BCC for large-group emails.