Blind carbon copy (Bcc) for multiple email recipients

To and Cc

When emailing to multiple recipients, it is common practice for people to include a whole bunch of email addresses in the To or Cc fields. This works OK and is fine when all recipients know each other well. In other cases though, there are serious disadvantages. The problem is that each recipient’s email address is distributed to all the other recipients whether they like it or not.

• Many people simply don’t like to give their email address to those they don’t know.
• Computer viruses etc collect and make use of email addresses to distribute their malicious payloads and may even be involved in harvesting email addresses for unscrupulous email spammers.

Bcc

To overcome these concerns it is good practice to use the Bcc field when addressing emails to multiple recipients. This is because the email addresses of Bcc recipients are not distributed to other recipients. The To field may be left blank or can be addressed to yourself.

Unfortunately the Bcc field is often not available by default. If this is the situation for you, the following will help you to make the Bcc field available:

In Outlook Express

When you come to addressing your email

1. Click on View in the menu bar
2. Click on Show All Headers

In Outlook

When you come to addressing your email

1. Click on View in the menu bar
2. Click on Show Bcc:

Use the Bcc field to enter multiple email addresses when you don't want to distribute email addresses to people who don't know each other.