E-mail Addressing Tips

[scuzzy]

When e-mailing, do you ever wonder what the "CC" and "BCC" fields are for?

CC stands for "Carbon Copy", and is intended to send the CC recipient a copy of the correspondence that you addressed to someone else. For example, let's say you want to send an e-mail to a vendor about a purchase, and you want to send a copy of the correspondence to your supervisor. You would enter the vendor's e-mail address in the "TO" field, and the supervisor's e-mail address in the "CC" field. Yes, you could enter both addresses in the "TO" field. However, that defeats the idea of the CC field. In my example, the correspondence is not intended directly for your boss. One thing to keep in mind is that any address in the "CC" field will show up in the e-mail header. In other words, all recipients of the e-mail will know who received copies.

BCC stands for "Blind Carbon Copy" and is also intended to send the BCC recipient a copy of the correspondence. However, unlike placing addresses in the "CC" field, none of the recipients will know that you sent a "blind" copy to someone else, since addresses in the "BCC" field will not show up in the e-mail header. In my example, you may not want the vendor to see that you're also sending copies of the e-mail to your supervisor. So, you'd enter your supervisor's e-mail address in the "BCC" field.

Here's a possible working example: In the "TO" field you enter the vendor's address. In the "CC" field you enter your supervisor's address, and in the "BCC" field you enter the vendor's supervisor's address. All the recipients would see the addresses in the "TO" and "CC" fields. However, nobody in the "TO" and "CC" fields would know that you sent a copy to the vendor's supervisor.

There is one other big advantage of using the "BCC" field. If you're like me, you hate to receive e-mail that's been forwarded 50 times with a large header that's loaded with what seems like hundreds of e-mail addresses. Personally, I don't like the idea of my e-mail address being forwarded hundreds of times throughout cyberspace. Here's how you can make a difference: When you want to send out something of interest to all your friends, place their e-mail addresses in the "BCC" field, then place your own address in the "TO" field (the "TO" field cannot be left blank). All your friends will receive the e-mail, but they will only see your e-mail address in the header.

Here's a hint if you often forward things of interest to many of your friends. In your e-mail address book, create a new group called "Friends" (or whatever) and enter all their e-mail addresses in that group. Then, forward whatever e-mail you want to them by placing your address in the "TO" field, and then simply enter "Friends" in the BCC. All your friends get a copy of the e-mail, while you did your part to maintain their privacy.