BCC recipients receive copies of emails addressed to other recipients, without the actual addressees being informed. This may sound like questionable covert behavior at first, but it is quite justified in certain communication situations – particularly when the email addresses of BCC recipients have to be protected.
There are three primary motives here:
- Data privacy: Only add contacts to the CC field if they agree to their email addresses being shared with all recipients.
- Spam prevention: Email circulars that contain all addresses of a mailing list in the To or CC field present easy targets for spammers.
- Virus protection: Protect your contacts from malware by not revealing their email addresses to other recipients in the To or CC field of circulars. Cyber criminals also sign up for newsletters or advertising mails and exploit email addresses that are carelessly shared for their own nefarious purposes.
The BCC field is ideal for use with email circulars to a large group of recipients.
Imagine you’d like to send Christmas greetings to your customers, business partners, and suppliers. To alleviate the task, you opt not to send out individual emails, but instead send each contact the same message. Would you address all your contacts in the To or CC field, visible to all? Probably not. To protect your customers’ data and keep your business relationships hidden, you should use the BCC field instead.
But data privacy isn’t only relevant to the business sector. A teacher, for example, should also avoid adding contact lists to the CC field and instead address recipients via BCC when emailing information to the participants of a parents’ evening. This approach protects the recipients’ data and prevents email addresses from being disseminated unchecked – whereby they could potentially end up in the hands of spammers.
However, blind carbon copies are unsuitable for internal communication processes.
Companies also engage in active email correspondence internally. Here, email copies can inform colleagues and superiors about workflows and promote transparency. In contrast, the BCC feature can be detrimental to transparent communication.
Just imagine you are discussing a sensitive issue by email, but your conversation partner not only replies to you but also to a third party via BCC without your knowledge. You would likely feel deceived or at least ask why the other recipient was kept secret.
Therefore, we recommend refraining from using the BCC feature within your organization. The CC field is a better choice in this context. That is unless you deliberately wish to keep certain colleagues out of longer email discussions. The reason for this is that BCC recipients are not automatically addressed using the “Reply to All” feature. If you’d simply like to let a colleague know about your email without including them in follow-up correspondence, it may be a good idea to add them to the BCC field and explicitly inform other recipients about this in your message.