How to Use the Blind Carbon Copy Feature on Your Email

The blind carbon copy, or Bcc, is a nifty tool that lets you send an email to a large number of people without forcing them to scroll through three or four screens worth of addresses (or waste three or four pages of paper if they print their emails) before they get to the contents of the email.  The blind carbon copy is ideal for announcements that you send to everyone in your address book or for forwarding to everyone in your address book those great jokes that you receive in your email.  With the blind carbon copy you can send an email to ten thousand people and the only names that each recipient will see will be the name/email address of the intended recipient in the To: line, their name/email address and your name/email address in the From: line.  The names and email addresses of the other 9,999 recipients will not show because the blind carbon copy tool does not show them on the recipient's email.

In addition to saving your recipients from having to scroll through a series of addresses to get to the message, using the blind carbon copy also prevents spammers from seeing and copying these addresses.  Of course, the people in your address book have the highest integrity and would never engage in spam mailings.  However, when they forward the great joke to everyone in their address book some of those recipients may be spammers and, if you used the To:, rather than the bcc:, line to address the copy you sent out, the spammers in your recipients address book will now have the addresses of everyone in your address book.

 When you use the blind carbon copy to send a general notice to a large number of people or to forward something to everyone in your address book you do have to put an address in the To: line.  When I do this, I simply put my own address in here (you can email yourself from your own email) as it is simple and maintains everybody's privacy.