At times, you may like to send email to a few persons but without disclosing the email addresses of the recipients to one-another. This means that all the recipients of your email will be undisclosed recipients in so far as the other recipients of the same mail are concerned. In other words, a particular recipient of the email would not know as to who are the other recipients of the same mail since the email addresses of the other recipients will be hidden from him. This may be due to the need to maintain privacy of their email addresses or for whatever other reasons. It may be pointed out that many of us don’t like our email addresses displayed to other unknown people who might also be getting a copy of the same email that is being sent to us, and generally speaking we would like our email address to remain anonymous. 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. Therefore, it is possible to ensure that none of the recipients of the email would know the email address or other details of another person who is the “undisclosed recipient” of the same email. In this article, I’ll describe as to how to send an email to undisclosed recipients in the desktop email client Outlook Express. This article will also apply to Microsoft Outlook with some modifications. [For reading more about sending email to undisclosed recipients, and particularly for Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, click here.]
Normally, while sending an email you write the address of the recipients in the “To” field or the “Cc” filed while composing a new email. Here, “Cc” 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 an email to a 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 other 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 other recipients of the email. Thus, such person becomes “undisclosed recipient”.
To send email to undisclosed recipients in Outlook Express, proceed as under:
(1) Start Outlook Express.
(2) Start a new message. For this purpose, click on the Create Mail button on the toolbar. Or else, click on New menu item on the File menu and then from the popup menu, click on Mail Message.
(3) A New Message window will appear on the screen. Check whether the Bcc field is visible on the screen just below the To and Cc fields. If it is not visible, then click on View menu in the above New Message window and then ensure that All Headers menu option is selected, i.e., a check-mark is present in front of it (see image below):
(4) The New Message window now shows the Bcc field, as shown in the following image:
(5) Enter all those email addresses in the Bcc field, to whom you want to send the email as undisclosed recipients (see the above image). Let the To and Cc fields remain blank. Now enter the appropriate text in the Subject and the main contents areas. Finally, click Send button.
That’s all! Your email will now be delivered to all the recipients. And, since the email addresses of all the recipients were entered in the Bcc field, they will be undisclosed recipients, i.e., their email addresses will not be disclosed or revealed to one-another.
If you want to send an email to certain persons, some of whom you want to keep undisclosed while the others’ email addresses could be disclosed, then the email addresses which could be so disclosed (i.e., which are not undisclosed recipients) can be entered in the normal To or Cc fields as per your choice. But, the email addresses of those recipients whom you want to keep as undisclosed or hidden, should be mentioned only in the Bcc field in the New Message window. Thus, it is possible to send a common email to some disclosed (or open) recipients and some undisclosed (or concealed) recipients at the same time.
While sending the above email to some undisclosed recipients, if you so wish, you can enter your own email address in the To field (i.e., the email address from which this email is being sent). However, it is not necessary and is optional. Even if you leave the To and Cc fields blank, and enter the email addresses of the recipients only in the Bcc field, the message will be sent by Outlook Express.
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