Blind Carbon Copy - What It Is, Why And How To Use It

What is BCC?

In the context of e-mail, blind carbon copy (abbreviated BCC and sometimes referred to as Blind Courtesy Copy or Blank Carbon Copy) refers to the practice of sending a message to multiple recipients in such a way that what they receive does not contain the complete list of recipients.

To specify recipients, an e-mail 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 recipients who receive the message without seeing who else received it

Why Use It?

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.

This is a 'pet hate' of mine because I frequently receive emails from friends that have been sent to everyone in their address book. I don't mind seeing everyone's email address but I DO object to my private email address being given to perfect strangers.

From a professional standpoint I send my monthly newsletters to my clients but all the addresses are BCC to protect their personal addresses.

How Do You Use It?

Every email service handles it a slightly different way but here is how 'yahoo' deal with it. Annoyingly, most services don't show it as default so you have to enable it!

When you create a new email you will see:

To the right of the "To" field is a "Show BCC" link. Clicking this adds a third box to the "To" and "CC" boxes:

All you do now is add those addresses you want hidden (separated by semi-colons in Yahoo) to the "BCC" box and send normally.