BarTalk December 2001
Volume 13, Number 6

Occasionally, when an email is sent to many people it will be accompanied by pages listing the other recipients and their email addresses. This is a potential breach of privacy since some individuals may not want anyone else to know their email address.

A way to avoid this possible embarrassment is to use the following procedure: In order to hide the recipient list of an email sent to a group of people, the recipients should be entered into the “Bcc” (Blind Carbon Copy) field rather than the “To” field. Usually it is a good idea to enter the sender’s address in the “To” field as some mail servers may reject email that has this field blank. Recipients who reply to the email will only be replying to the original sender.

If the email requires further discussion amongst all the recipients, using the “Bcc” field will not work. In this instance the “To” and “Cc” fields will need to be used. This should only be done if you are confident that all of the recipients are okay with all of the other recipients seeing their email address.

Thanks to the College Quarterly, the newsletter of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, for allowing BarTalk to repeat its discussion of this issue.

This article was published in the December 2001 issue of BarTalk.