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How to Send an Email to Undisclosed Recipients

By Heinz Tschabitscher, About.com

I'm sure you know these emails that were obviously sent to a group of people: everybody's email address is in the To: (or the Cc:) field, forming a long, long list.

This not only looks odd and unprofessional, it also exposes the email addresses of people who may have wanted to keep them private.

Bcc Means Privacy and Efficiency with Group Email

Fortunately, you don't have to send individual emails to avoid this embarrassing exposure of email addresses. In addition to To: and Cc: recipients that show up in the email's headers, you can insert Bcc: recipients.

Bcc: recipients get a copy of the email, but their email address is automatically deleted at delivery. Nobody except you and the Bcc: recipient will know that they got a copy, and their email address will not be exposed.

Send an Email to Undisclosed Recipients

To send an email to undisclosed recipients, select your email program or service, or follow the general instructions below.

Windows

Web-Based Email

Mac

Mobile

Generic

  • Create a new message in your email client.
  • Insert "Undisclosed Recipients" in the To: field, followed by your email address in "<,>" braces.
    • The To: field should look like: "Undisclosed Recipients <me@example.com>".
    • If you send emails to undisclosed recipients frequently, you can add your own email address to your address book with "Undisclosed" as the first and "recipients" as the last name. Instead of filling in the To: field manually, you can then use the address book entry.
  • Put all the recipients' email addresses in the Bcc: field, separated by commas.
    • The Bcc: field could look something like: "my.first.friend@example.net, my_second_friend@example.net, stillanotherfriend@example.com".
  • Compose your message.
  • Send it.
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