Blind Carbon Copy
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In the context of email, blind carbon copy, abbreviated bcc, refers to the practice of sending a message to multiple recipients in such a way that what they receive does not contain the complete list of recipients.
There are a number of reasons for using this feature:
- To send a copy of your correspondence to a third party (for example, a colleague) when you don't want to let the recipient know that you're doing this (or when you don't want the recipient to know the third party's email address).
- When sending an email to multiple recipients, you can hide their email addresses from each other. This is a sensible anti-spam precaution, because it avoids making a long list of email addresses available to all the recipients (which is what happens if you put everyone's address in the 'cc:' or 'to:' fields). For this reason, it often makes sense to use bcc: for mailing lists.
'Bcc' is also occasionally used to make certain types of spam email look more convincing - by hiding your email, the spammer may hope to trick you into believing you've accidentally received an email (about some amazing one-off bargain that will make you millions) that wasn't intended for you.
Basically, any recipients can see all email addresses specified in the To: and CC: fields. No recipients can see any email address (other than their own) in the BCC: field.
See also
- carbon copy (cc)es:bcc