I’m sure you’re all very familiar with getting emails that have multiple recipients in the address field. The typical scenario is sending an email to recipients who are directly involved in the discussion with possible indirect participants who are CC’d or “Carbon Copied”. However, when someone wants to share news or information they can get a little overzealous with the “To” list. Then when each recipient “Replies All” everyone gets a copy. Like a group text! Ugh! While there is good purpose and intent with the Reply All command in certain situations, an email with 50 or more recipients can become quite annoying to some. Not to mention how much email it builds up in people’s Inbox and in the email server database. Well there is a better way!
Bcc stands for “Blind Carbon Copy.” This means that if you add 20 recipient names in the Bcc box, each recipient will only see their own. Then if they choose Reply All, only the sender will receive a copy. As I said before, if you’re addressing a small group where each recipient needs to view the collaboration of the email, this is useful. But if it’s sharing some personal news or advertisement, Bcc is a good way to curb the potential Email Gone Wild scenario. You may also want to use Bcc to keep other recipients email addresses private to the group. Respecting peoples private information is very important these days.
As useful of a tool that Bcc is, you may experience a few problems. Bcc is widely used by spammers. For that reason some junk email filters may flag them as junk when an email arrives with the recipient name in this field. Making sure you’re on the Safe Senders list of whoever you are sending to will keep this from happening. Here on campus this will not be a problem. Another possible problem is using distribution lists in the Bcc field. If a recipient has any rules in place to sort emails by recipient, this will cause them problems. However, sorting is usually indicated where repetitive emails arrive for a specific reason. And lastly, many email providers limit the number of recipients to try and repress spammers. You will get errors and warnings if this is the case.
So how do you use this field? Each email client is different, including the many webmail options, but the CC and Bcc options are usually very obvious and easy to get to. On campus we use Outlook for email. At first glance when you open a new email you won’t see the Bcc option. But if you click the “To” button, a dialogue box will appear with the whole campus list of email users and distribution lists. At the bottom of this box will be the “Bcc” field. Use it the same way you would the “To” and “CC” fields. Maybe practice using it with a few coworkers or friends. So the next time you want to send out some cool info, the Bcc field will prevent you from becoming the origin of an EMAIL STORM! Lol!
