BLOG: Use BCCs to Hide Addresses of People You Copy on an Email

You get an email containing a joke with dozens of email addressess at the top because many people have forwarded that same joke to many other people before you. Then YOU send it on to others, further exposing all those private email addresses to even more people. Stop it.

If you want to send the joke to others, hit FORWARD and then delete all those earlier email addresses right down to where the joke begins. Then, when you address your email, place your recipients’ email addresses into the BCC (Blind Carbon Copies) box.

If you must have some address listed in TO, just put your own email address there. (Yes, Virginia, you can send an email to yourself.) But you can send an email in Outlook even if ALL the addresses are in the BCC field.

Why delete the many email addresses of other people before you forward an email? Because you should protect your email address and other people’s email addresses the same as you would private phone numbers---never giving them out to dozens, maybe hundreds, of strangers as often happens when uninformed people forward emails.

How do you send emails using BCC?  Easy. In Outlook Express (which most people use) open up a new email window.  Click on view and then click on “View all headers” on the drop down menu.  That creates a BCC box in which you can enter email addresses.

In Microsoft Outlook (far better product), if using Microsoft Word as the editor, open up a blank email window and click the arrow to the right of the Options button and then click Bcc.

If using Microsoft Outlook as the editor, On the View menu, click Bcc Field.

Easy! And now you can protect your email address and those of others. You are even able to covertly copy someone whom one of the other email recipients does not need to know got a copy of that same email.

Hey, using BCC you can even more safely deal in friendly gossip and even corporate intrigue!