Respect Thy Sister’s (and Thy Brother’s) Email Addresses by Laurelin Remington-Wolf
In this day and age, people will really appreciate the fact that you are trying to protect their privacy by not distributing their email address to everyone you choose to contact with your important message. Back in the day of typewriters and carbon paper, the number of people that you could send your letter to was fairly limited unless you typed the letter multiple times. (Remember stacking up piles of paper alternating with carbon paper, hopefully with the carbon paper facing the right direction……?) The number of copies you could make at one time was limited by how many pieces of paper your typewriter could hold and still have the typewriter keys be able to make an impression on the bottom paper in the stack.
We’re talking pre-copy machine here. Ahhhhh, the good old days.) The letter was usually addressed to one person, and anyone that was going to receive one of the “carbon copies” was listed at the bottom of the letter with “cc:” by their name. This ensured that everyone receiving the message knew who else had received it. However, occasionally (and this is the part that always made me feel like a spy), the message was also sent to someone else whose name was not on any of the copies and that none of the other recipients knew about. That copy was called a “blind carbon copy” or “bcc.”These same terms have been kept in our electronic age today when most people alive today don’t even know what carbon paper is. In an email message, the email addresses listed in the “To:” field and the “Cc:” field are visible to everyone that receives the message. Any addresses listed in the “Bcc:” field will not be visible. To take advantage of this, you can put your own email address in the “To:” field (because most email programs will require at least one address in this field), and all of the other email addresses should be put in the “Bcc:” field. They will receive the message, but not be able to see who else has received it. In these days of email spam, your friends will be very grateful that you are not sending their email address to anyone that might be overly concerned about the size of certain things. Unfortunately, these people usually have a strong desire to share that concern with others.
Sometimes you have to hunt around a bit in your particular email program to find out how to make the “Bcc:” field visible so that you can enter email addresses into it. For example, in Yahoo mail you will see “Show BCC” to the right of the “To:” field. If you click on this, it will add a field for the “Bcc:” addresses at the top of your email message below the “Cc:” field. Different email programs have various ways of handling this. The following link will take you to an article that lists some of the major email programs and what you have to do to make the “Bcc:” field visible in those programs.
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