Outlook Express Tips

Outlook Express Tips

How to use Outlook Express: Quickly - Safely - Effectively

Smarter Way To Use BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) Field


Are you using BCC field to forward emails to your friends? If so, use this little tip to get rid of Undisclosed-Recipient:; in your emails and add a bit more style to them.

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BCC is useful field to hide recipients of your email from each other. When you put email addresses from your address book into this field and send them away here is what happens.

First, your mail server (also called SMTP server) will receive your email and form a list of all recipients. If they were added into the BCC field the server would split the email into a few separate emails (the more recipients in BCC field, the more separate emails it would be split to). Next, each email is delivered to the target Inbox. If all of the recipients were in BCC field, each one of them would see Undisclosed-Recipient:; instead of email address that would normally be present in To field. This looks odd and impersonal.

You can change this and make it look better by doing the following.

First - go to your address book and create a new contact - in this example I'll call it My Friends but you may call it whatever you like. Set the email address to point to your own address. Click Add button to add this new contact into your address book.

create email address for bcc forward

When forwarding an email, in message compose window you need to put My Friends contact in To field and all your friend addresses into the BCC field.

using to and bcc fields in message compose window

Obviously, by doing it this way, you will also receive a copy of the email but at least it will look more stylish. So instead of looking at Undisclosed-Recipient:; in To field like before your friends will see My Friends instead.

So here is a screenshot how your friends used to see your message before.

to field before

And here it is how it looks after applying the above.

to field after

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