BCC

BCC stands for blind carbon copy, an email field that lets you send a copy of a message to one or more recipients whose addresses are hidden from everyone else. Unlike the CC (carbon copy) field, where all recipients can see one another, addresses placed in BCC are invisible to the other people on the message — each recipient sees only their own.

How BCC works

When you send an email, the To and CC fields are visible to all recipients, exposing who received the message. Addresses in the BCC field, by contrast, receive the same email but are omitted from the copy everyone else sees. The mail server delivers to them silently, so no recipient learns that the BCC recipients exist, nor can any recipient see the others in that field. It is, in effect, a private copy.

When to use BCC

BCC has two main uses. The first is privacy: when emailing a group of people who do not know one another, putting them in BCC prevents everyone's address from being exposed to strangers, which also reduces the risk of a careless reply-all or of harvesting addresses. The second is quiet record-keeping, such as copying an archive address without cluttering the visible recipients. BCC is not a substitute for proper bulk email, however. Sending marketing messages by cramming many addresses into BCC often hurts deliverability and looks unprofessional; genuine email marketing should go through a platform that sends individual, personalised messages, often via an autoresponder, with proper authentication such as SPF. Used for its intended purpose — protecting recipient privacy on a shared message — BCC is a simple but important feature of everyday email etiquette.