Email – What is Bcc?
BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy. It refers to sending an email to multiple recipients without disclosing the individual email addresses. While sending the same email/message to multiple recipients, it is a common practice for most of us to separate the email addresses with a comma or semi-colon and insert all those addresses in the To: field. When emails are sent this way, each receiver can see the complete list of recipient email addresses to which the same message is being sent. Unlike To: the BCC: option allows you to hide the recipients in email messages. In other words, when emails are sent using BCC, the receiver cannot see the list of recipient email addresses. Thus using BCC is a smart way to protect the privacy of the recipients.
To specify recipients, an email message may contain addresses in any of these three fields:
- To: Primary recipients
- Cc: Carbon copy to secondary recipients—other interested parties
- Bcc: Blind carbon copy to additional recipients who receive the message without anyone else (including the To, Cc, and Bcc recipients) seeing who the extra recipients are.
It is common practice to use the Bcc: field when addressing a very long list of recipients or a list of recipients that should not (necessarily) know each other, e.g., in mailing lists.
Benefits of using Bcc:
There are several reasons for using this feature:
BCC is often used to prevent an accidental “Reply All” from sending a reply intended only for the message’s originator to the entire recipient list.
To send a copy of one’s correspondence to a third party when one does not want to let the recipient know that this is being done.
To send a message to multiple parties without them knowing the other recipients. This can be accomplished by addressing a message to oneself and filling in the actual intended recipients in the Bcc: field.
When sending an email to multiple recipients, one can hide their email addresses from another.
This is a sensible anti-spam precaution because it avoids making a long list of email addresses available to all the recipients (which happens if one puts everyone’s address in the To: or Cc: fields). For this reason, it often makes sense to use the Bcc: field for mailing lists. Some viruses also harvest email addresses from users’ cache folders or address books, and large CC lists may further the propagation of viruses, giving another reason to use Bcc:
How to send a BCC an email message?
Most email clients provide the BCC: option under a few lines below the To: field. All you have to do is enter the list of recipients in the BCC: field instead of entering in the To: field. You may enter only your email address in the To: field. Once you do this, just hit the Send button.
It would be best if you used BCC: when sending bulk messages to protect the privacy of your recipients.