Best Practices on Sending Bulk Emails

When you are sending emails to multiple recipients, please be mindful about the potential risk of leaking personal and/or privacy information.

Recommendations

For security and privacy reasons, it is best to use the Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) feature when sending an email to large number of people.  When you place email addresses in the BCC field of a message, they are invisible to the recipients of the email. Conversely, any email addresses that you place in the TO or CC field are visible to everyone who receives the message.

Using the BCC field to send bulk email to large group of people has a number of benefits, including:-

• The recipient list is kept undisclosed. There may be instances when you want to send the same message to multiple recipients without letting them know who else is receiving the message. Each recipient receives the message will not be able to see the addresses in the BCC field, or deduce the list of recipient.
• The email addresses is protected if the message is forwarded. When an email message is forwarded, the addresses in TO and CC field will be forwarded along with the message. On the other hand, addresses in the BCC field are not forwarded.
• Prevent unnecessary emails. When a recipient use the “Reply All” function, reply email will be sent to all recipients in the TO and CC field, which could be annoying to other recipients. By placing recipients in the BCC field, you help protect them from receiving unnecessary replies.

Most email clients have the option to BCC, commonly below the CC field. However, sometimes it is a separate option not displayed by default. If you are using Outlook, check the ‘Options’ ribbon bar where you could find the button to show BCC field.

Published on:  Jul 2017