Using BCC to Hide Email Addresses

BCC – What’s that?

BCC stands for blind carbon copy and refers to sending a copy of (or the actual) email to someone without each recipient seeing the entire list of recipients.

How to turn it on?

The BCC feature may not be immediately visible in your email software. It’s sometimes turned off by default and you’ll have to enable this so that it can be used.

In Microsoft Outlook for example there is an option in the ribbon bar to show the BCC field.

Why Should I BCC?

There are many reasons to use the BCC field when sending an email.

• Secrecy - You should blind copy an email to someone so that the other addresses do not know that you send someone a copy.
• Send it to yourself - You can blind copy yourself to another email address, for example to copy an important email from your work address to your personal address.

Multiple Recipients

You can blind copy many email addresses in the BCC field. This is especially useful if you are sending the email to multiple recipients.

This feature of blind copy is very important. This ensures that you don’t reveal all of the email addresses you are sending to, to each other.
You need to be exceptionally careful in revealing email addresses to other people.

Sending emails to many, unrelated people without hiding the respective email address can anger and annoy the owners of those addresses.

Treat their email address how you would like yours to be treated.

By revealing your clients email addresses to other you may be in breach of your own privacy policy.