Have you ever wondered what the extra email field is under ‘To’ and ‘CC’ that’s labeled ‘BCC?’
Let’s start with the ‘CC’ field and it will make more sense. For us old timers, ‘CC’ meant Carbon Copy but that’s a reference to the ancient way of creating a copy using carbon paper. I’m sure most of our Blog readers have no idea what carbon paper looks like so the up.to.date translation of ‘CC’ is Courtesy Copy. In short, you’re informing the addressed recipient of your message that you’re sharing the contents of the message with someone else, ie. the person identified in the ‘CC’ field.
‘BCC’ is the abbreviation for Blind Courtesy Copy and it functions the same as ‘CC’ in that it includes another recipient to your message but if differs in that the additional recipient’s address does not appear in the message header like ‘TO’ and ‘CC’ do.
When would you use ‘BCC?’
In most cases, this field would be used for group messages wherein none of your recipients needs to track or know about the other recipients. For instance, your local Participation Chair sends out weekly messages to the entire list of participants announcing the program for the coming week. There is no need for half of the message length to be a list of arbitrary email addresses representing all 53 recipients of the message. In this case, the Participation Chair should insert all of the email addresses into the ‘BCC’ field resulting in a ‘message only’ email on the other end. (Depending on your email handler, you may or may not need to include yourself in the ‘TO’ field to allow this feature to work. Just give it a try and you’ll know pretty quickly if you’re one of these folks.)
Another benefit to using ‘BCC’ is privacy and that’s a pretty big deal these days. How many times have you received an email from someone that’s been forwarded around a hundred times and each time it includes a variety of email addresses of people you’ve never heard of? It’s poor etiquette to do this, in the first place, but easily avoidable if you simply employ the use of the ‘BCC’ field when composing your group messages.
Finally, if you don’t see the ‘BCC’ field when you regularly compose a message, it’s probably just hidden. Look around for a button or link to ‘add BCC’ or ‘view details,’ etc. It won’t be far away so just look around.
For questions or suggestions about more Tech Tuesday topics, feel free to email Tracy.
