Using the Bcc Field in macOS Mail
To send a message to Bcc recipients in macOS Mail: When each of the Bcc recipients receives the email, it displays “Undisclosed Recipients” followed by their address in the To field, along with any names you entered in the To field when you sent the email. The other names entered into the Bcc field don’t show, although the presence of Undisclosed Recipients in the To field indicates there are other recipients. You also can use the keyboard shortcut Command+Option+B to toggle the Bcc field on and off in the header of the email. Your efforts to protect a Bcc recipient’s privacy may be in vain if that person selects Reply All, which sends a reply to anyone listed in the To and CC fields. The Bcc sender reveals his existence, but not that of the other Bcc recipients. If you forget who you Bcc’d on an email, you can see the recipients of your emails including Bcc recipients, at any time. However, no one who receives your email can access the Bcc information.
Why?
The widespread use of email has given rise to an unwritten set of protocols that help users send and receive email productively and courteously, and macOS Mail is no exception. MacOS Mail, like most email apps, offers an easy privacy workaround: the Bcc feature. One such “good manners” protocol has to do with sending a single email to a group of people who don’t necessarily know one another. It’s considered bad form because listing all the email addresses in the To field doesn’t respect the privacy of the individual recipients. Each recipient can see the email addresses of all the other recipients—a situation one or more might find objectionable or intrusive. Another potential pitfall of sending the same message to multiple recipients at the same time is the perceived lack of personalization. The recipient of such an email might—correctly or incorrectly—feel that the sender didn’t deem the correspondence important enough to create a personal message. Lastly, you might not want to reveal all the recipients you sent an email to avoid awkward work or personal situations.
Bcc: What It Is and What It Does
Bcc is an abbreviation for blind carbon copy—a term held over from the days of typewriters and hard copy. Back then, a typist might include Bcc: [names] at the bottom of an original correspondence to tell the primary respondent that others received copies of it. In modern-day email usage, using Bcc protects the privacy of all the recipients. The sender enters all the email addresses of the group in the Bcc field rather than the To field. Each recipient can see only their address. The other email addresses to which the email is sent remain hidden.
