BCC is an abbreviation used in email, which simply stands for Blind Carbon Copy. A typical email address can have three classes of email recipients: To recipients, CC recipients, and BCC recipients. To recipients are considered the primary recipients of the email, CC recipients are those who receive carbon copies of the email, and BCC recipients are those who receive carbon copies of the email but whose addresses I can’t see any other recipients.
man holding computer
The purpose of the BCC field in an email is to allow a long list of interested parties to receive the email, but their email addresses remain hidden. Recipients listed in the To field are generally considered to be those to whom the message is actively addressed, and therefore a message containing only To recipients has their email addresses exposed to each other, since they are assumed to be working on the To field. same project, or are part of the same group. CC recipients, on the other hand, are interested parties who are not being contacted directly, and in some situations it may be appropriate to know the email addresses of others. BCC recipients are used when you include a large number of recipients or people from diverse backgrounds who may not want to share their email addresses with a larger group.
The BCC field can also be very useful if you want to easily send a copy of an email to someone, without the primary recipient knowing that someone is receiving a copy of the email. While this can be done by simply making a second copy of the email body and forwarding it, the BCC field allows you to do this with a single click. Since the BCC recipient can see the recipient’s email address and name, if one is included, they know who the email is intended for, but it would appear to the recipient that they were the only person who received the email.
On mailing lists, the BCC field is traditionally used as a courtesy to the people on the list. Even if everyone on the list was okay with everyone else on the list having access to their email addresses, having such a long list of emails poses a spam risk for everyone on the list. Many spam lists are generated by the presence of a virus on a person’s local computer, which collects email addresses from incoming emails. A mailing list email can provide a huge list of addresses for these viruses, and the use of BCC means that this list never exists on anyone other than the sender’s computer, greatly reducing the risk of a virus get the addresses.
The concept of blind copying actually predates personal computers and email by some time. Typists would occasionally produce many copies of a letter by alternating pages of carbon paper with plain writing paper, so that when the typewriter keys touched the pages, they made multiple copies. Addresses and salutations were often left blank during the carbon copy phase and then manually added later so letter recipients would not see who else was receiving the letter.
