Normally when you send an email to somebody from your Gmail or Yahoo! Mail account or some other email account, his email address is displayed in the message delivered to him. If you send a copy of that email to another person or to 2-3 other persons, their email addresses will also be displayed in the message delivered to them. However, there are occasions when you don’t want to disclose the email addresses of some or all of the recipients in the delivered email. For example, when you are sending an email to a person and you’re also marking a copy of that email to some other person, you may not want to disclose to such first person that a copy of the email is also being marked to the second person. Therefore, you’ll have to hide the email address of the second person to whom a copy is being marked. At times, you want to send email to a few persons but without displaying the email address of any of them. This means that all the recipients of your email will be undisclosed recipients. This may be due to the need to maintain privacy of their email addresses or for whatever other reasons. Fortunately, it is possible to send email to one or more or all undisclosed recipients, i.e., without disclosing the recipient’s email address or other details in the email to the other recipients. Therefore, it is possible to ensure that none of the recipients of the email would know the email address or other details of the other person who is the “undisclosed recipient” of the same email. This feature is supported by all the major email service providers such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, AOL, etc. It is also supported in the desktop email clients such as Outlook Express.
Normally, while sending an email you write the address of the recipient in the “To” field while composing a new email. If you want to send a copy of this email to another person, you can add his email address in the same “To” filed after adding a comma after the first address; or alternatively, you can enter the email address of the second person in the “Cc” which is the abbreviated form of the expression “carbon copy”. When this email reaches its recipients, the email addresses of all of them which were entered in the “To” field or the “Cc” field will be visible to all the recipients.
However, there is another field “Bcc”, which is the abbreviated form of “blind carbon copy”, which can also be used to send copy of the email to another person. The advantage of the “Bcc” field is that an email address mentioned in that field does not get displayed in the email delivered to any of its recipients. This means that if you mark a copy of an email to a person by entering his email address in the “Bcc” field (instead of the normal “To” or “Cc” fields), then his email address will remain undisclosed from the recipients of the email. Thus, such person becomes “undisclosed recipient”.
You can mark copy of an email to several persons by entering their email addresses in the “Bcc” field by separating them by comma, and all these email addresses will not be disclosed to any of the recipients.
Thus, the “Bcc” field ensures the privacy of such “undisclosed recipients”. And, the good thing is that the identity of one “Bcc” recipient will not be visible to even to other “Bcc” recipients.
See, the following image showing Compose mail window for Gmail with all the three fields “To”, “Cc” and “Bcc” being displayed therein:
Also see, the following image showing Compose mail or New mail window for Yahoo! Mail with all the three fields “To”, “Cc” and “Bcc” being displayed therein:
If the “Bcc” field is not displayed in the Compose mail window, click “Add Bcc” link for Gmail, and click “Show Bcc” link for Yahoo! Mail to display it.
It is pertinent to point out that it is also possible to make all recipients of an email “undisclosed recipients” in which case no email address will be shown in any of the “To”, “Cc” or the “Bcc” field in the delivered email. Instead of that in the “To” field, the expression “undisclosed recipients” will be displayed in the delivered email (or it may be empty). In this manner you can ensure the privacy of the all the recipients of an email. For doing this, keep both the “To” field and the “Cc” filed empty, i.e., do not enter any email address in any of these two fields. And then, enter the email addresses of all the recipients in the “Bcc” field. Thus, the delivered email will not show any email address now and will instead show “undisclosed recipients” in the “To” field (or may be an empty field).
I may also point out that when a person is kept an undisclosed recipient of an email in this manner, his email address will not be visible to others even if you open the full headers of the email. Nonetheless, the email is still delivered scrupulously to all the recipients. Therefore, all the recipients will receive the email (irrespective of whether their email addresses are entered in “To” field, “Cc” field or the “Bcc” field); but the email addresses entered in the “Bcc” field will remain hidden in the delivered email.
So, use this feature whenever you want to send an email to more than one person but do not want to disclose the identity of one or more or all of the recipients. As I mentioned earlier, you can avail of this feature irrespective of whether your email account is with Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, or for that matter, with any other email service provider. [If you want to learn how to send email to undisclosed recipients in Outlook Express, then click here.]
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My received e-mail show “undisclosed recipients” followed without any attached email address and in “To” or “Cc” column, only show the recipients’ name but not their address. I would like to know how to create one.