So much of our modern communications technology gets dumped in our laps without instructions other than USE ME! Oh, there’s usually a “help” button on it somewhere – but honestly, how many of you click that, or if you did quickly gave up because it wanted you to view a bunch of slides/verbiage and your eyes quickly glazed over?
Thus it’s no wonder that you may be accidentally annoying your friends, as well as exposing them and many strangers to spam address collectors and hackers if you don’t know about using BCC.
BCC = “Blind Carbon Copy” (forget that anyone under ~25 may never have seen carbon paper used!). BCC is one of the fields available in the header when you are composing an email (in some applications you may need to expand the header to find it). Any addresses you put into the BCC field will be delivered normally… BUT… unlke using the TO or CC fields, the recipient will not see any other addresses you put into BCC – hence “blind.”
When sending email to many people, if they do not already know each other (e.g., people who subscribe to your newsletter or who want to be kept informed about your band’s gigs) you do NOT want to send your message in such a way that they all can see each others’ addresses, for several reasons: