How do I hide the email address I'm sending email to?
Hi everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com. Have you ever gotten a piece of email
that doesn't have any recipients, or has the sender as as a recipient?
Most importantly, it doesn't show you as a recipient?
That is a feature of the email system called blind carbon copy or BCC.
That is a way for you to hide the email
address that you are sending an email to from everybody that gets that email.
Now, the origin of the term goes back to carbon paper.
Years ago when we were still using
typewriters, the way to make two copies of a document at the same time was to have
a piece of paper, a piece of cardboard paper,
and then another piece of paper in kind of a sandwich.
So you've got paper, paper, with carbon paper in the middle.
When the typewriter would strike a letter
on the first or the top sheet, the carbon paper would also cause
an impression of that letter on the second sheet.
So it was a carbon copy is what was called carbon copy, occasionally referred to now
as courtesy copy because we don't use carbon paper anymore.
Carbon copy was a way of sending something
to someone or sending somebody a copy of what it is you have sent.
So for example, I might send an email to you and carbon copy my boss.
And you'd see that on the CC line.
Bcc is the same concept, making a copy, sending a copy of a message,
but not having it show up in the email message itself.
Remember CC, you can see it's right up there underneath the two line.
You can see everybody that's getting the message BCC on.
A message that you receive is not shown. It's perfect.
So when you get an email that doesn't
appear to show your email address at all anywhere, well you were BCC'd.
This is something that spammers do all the time.
So it's important then to understand exactly.
Well, how do we make this happen?
What if I want to use it for legitimate purposes?
Most email programs hide it by default.
Let's run over and I'll show you where it
is in Outlook.com and you can then look for similar controls in other email
programs or the email program or email interface that you happen to be using.
Okay, so here we are in Windows Ten.
I've got Outlook.com Open and all I'm going to do is compose a new message.
Now, in the case of Outlook.com, they actually don't hide it.
There's a BCC line here.
You'll notice that neither the BCC or CC lines are visible over here.
In either of those cases, you need to click one of these icons over
here or one of these links to make that field visible.
So I'll click on BCC and there it is.
And now I can type in some other email
address that I would want to receive this message and when I send that message,
that email address will not appear in the message.
They'll still get it,
but the email address won't appear. In other email programs
this is often not visible.
That link of BCC is not visible.
What you need to look for then is a view
menu or other options related to your compose message window.
Like I said, it's present in almost every
email program or interface you can think of.
It's just often hidden. Now, in the companion article for this video,
I actually showed not only where it is in Outlook.com, but I also point out where
it is in gmail and I fire up the Outlook desktop email program and Thunderbird.
In both cases, it's fairly well hidden there.
But again, as I said, there's an ellipsis menu or a drop down
menu or a view menu or something that will allow you to then expose the BCC align.
But that's the magic. That's the magic.
There is something called BCC.
It is available in the compose window of whatever email interface you're using
and that's where you would put the email addresses to which you want to send
the message without their email address being present in the message.
Hope that helps for updates or comments for those additional examples.
For related links and more, visit askleo.com/1889. I'm Leo Notenboom
and this is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.