Information
When other individuals provide you with their email address, either directly or by sending you a message, there is the implicit expectation that you will not reveal it to others without their permission.
Just as you wouldn’t appreciate your place of employment giving out personal contact information, many individuals feel the same way about their email address. In fact, privacy has become a serious issue on the Internet and this concern will continue to grow as people realise the commercial value of their private information and as they fight a losing battle against spam (unsolicited and unwanted commercial or non-commercial email).
When you place email addresses in the ‘BCC:’ field of a message, those addresses are invisible to the recipients of the email. Conversely, any email addresses that you place in the ‘To:’ field or the ‘CC:’ field are visible to everyone who receives the message.
Keep in mind that many individuals do not want their email address to be distributed to people they do not know (or even those that they do!) and that without explicit authority such distribution of an individual’s email address is a breach of their privacy and contravenes the Data Protection Act 1998.
Using the ‘BCC:’ field to conceal email addresses acts as an anti-spam, anti-virus measure. If you use the ‘To:’ field or the ‘CC:’ field to send a message to a large group, it becomes more likely that the recipients will receive unwanted email. This could occur because recipients use the “Reply to All” feature to respond to your message. A second scenario that could create unwanted email involves spam programs that are designed to send spam to addresses found in the ‘To:’ and ‘CC:’ fields of messages. The ‘BCC:’ field protects against these scenarios.
Benefits
Using the ‘BCC:’ field to send an email message to a large group of individuals has a number of benefits, including:
The privacy of email addresses is protected in the original message
The recipients will receive a copy of your message, but they will not be able to see the addresses of the other recipients listed in the ‘BCC:’ field.
The privacy of email addresses is protected if the message is forwarded
When an email message is forwarded, the addresses of everyone in the ‘To:’ field and the ‘CC:’ field are also forwarded along with the message. Addresses that have been placed in the ‘BCC:’ field are not forwarded.
If a recipient uses the “Reply to All” option, the reply will not be sent to those individuals in the ‘BCC:’ field.
Occasionally an email recipient may respond to a message using the “Reply to All” feature. If you have placed a large list of recipients in the ‘To:’ or ‘CC:’ field, all of them will receive the reply. This can be an annoyance to other recipients, particularly if the reply is not relevant to them or was intended only for the original sender. By placing recipients in the ‘BCC:’ field, you can help protect them against receiving unnecessary replies.
Using the ‘BCC:’ field acts as an anti-spam precaution
Many viruses and spam programs are now able to sift through mail files and address books for email addresses. Using the ‘BCC:’ field is an effective anti-spam precaution because it reduces the likelihood that recipients will receive a spam message or a virus from another recipient’s infected computer.