What’s BCC?

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BCC means Blind Carbon Copy in emails. It allows recipients to receive a copy of the email without their email addresses being visible to others. BCC is useful for large groups and mailing lists to reduce spam risks. The concept predates computers and was used in typewritten letters.

BCC is an abbreviation used in emails, which simply means Blind Carbon Copy. A normal email address can have three classes of email recipients: To recipients, CC recipients, and Bcc recipients. To recipients are thought of as the primary recipients of the email, CC recipients are those who are receiving carbon copies of the email, and BCC recipients are those who are receiving carbon copies of the email, but the whose addresses no other recipient can see.

The point of the Bcc field in an email is to allow a long list of interested parties to receive the email, but for their email addresses to remain hidden. The recipients listed in the To field are usually considered to be the ones the message is actively targeting, so a message containing only To recipients has their email addresses exposed to each other, as it is assumed they are working on the same project , or are part of the same group. CC recipients, on the other hand, are interested parties who aren’t addressed directly, and in some situations it can be okay to know each other’s email addresses. Bcc recipients are used when a large number of recipients or people from different walks of life are included, who are unlikely to want to share their email addresses with the larger group.

The Bcc field can also be very useful if you want to send a copy of an email to someone easily, without the primary recipient knowing that someone is receiving a copy of the email. While this can be achieved by simply making a second copy of the email body and sending it again, the Bcc field allows for an easy one-click way to do this. Since recipient BCC can see recipient A’s email address and name, if any, he knows who the email is intended for, but it would appear to recipient A that he was the only person receiving the email. -mail.

In email mailing lists the Bcc field is traditionally used as a courtesy to people who are on the list. Even if everyone on the list was fine with everyone else on the list having access to your email address, having such a long list of emails poses a spam risk to everyone on the list. Many spam lists are generated by the presence of viruses on a person’s local computer, which collects email addresses from emails received. An email from a mailing list can provide a huge list of addresses for such viruses, and the use of BCC means that that list never exists on anyone but the sender’s computer, greatly reducing the risk of a virus getting the addresses.

The concept of blind carbon copying actually predates personal computers and e-mail by some time. Typists occasionally produced many copies of a letter by alternating carbon pages between regular typing paper, so that when the typewriter keys struck the pages, they made more copies. Addresses and salutations were often left blank during the carbon copy stage and were then added by hand later, so that recipients of letters would not see who else was receiving the letter.




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