So you’ve been collecting email addresses for a long time, and you’ve finally decided you need to start a mailing list.
You compose your first message, copy and paste the whole email list into the To: box and hit Send. You smile, satisfied with your accomplishment.
Little do you realize you are giving your entire email list to everyone you send it to.
Now I, for one, don’t really want you giving my email address to everyone on your list. Pretty sure most of the rest of us feel much the same.
So what to do?
Don’t despair. There’s a solution. You can’t get back the addresses you already sent out, but you can change your habits, and send messages that get to all your friends, but the only address they see is yours.
Introducing the BCC
CC and BCC come from the old days some of you may remember. In those days, you would take two or more pieces of paper, place a piece of carbon paper between each two pieces so you have a sandwich where the paper is the bread and the carbon paper is the filling. Then you feed the stack into a typewriter. When you type, the impact of the letters on the paper imprints letters onto the other pieces, and you have what is called a “carbon copy”. “CC: John P. Doe” was typed at the bottom of a letter to say that a copy was sent to the person. “BCC” stands for “Blind Carbon Copy” – that was usually typed on the letter manually so that the receiver knew they were receiving it and no one else knew (except the sender.)
Nuts and Bolts of BCC
Virtually all email systems have a BCC function. You just have to find it.
Usually the CC box (for copying someone) is visible. Sometimes BCC is, but sometimes it isn’t. If you have a function that allows you to click a button and choose from a list of addresses, odds are the BCC is visible there. If you have one for the To: box and another for the CC: box, you can probably find it when you look at the CC box. Any way you look at it, you need to find a box labeled BCC.
Once you’ve found it, go to your list of email addresses, select them all, and paste them into the BCC box.
Send the message, and you can sit back and truly be satisfied with your accomplishment.
Now you know!
THANK YOU for posting this! Bulk emails that expose my address really annoy and frighten me because they expose my email to spammers. I have a response that requests the sender to not do this in future mailings, and I am surprised at how many folks dont get it even after saying they do!