[ad name=”postsqrRight”]It seems even though email as a technology has been around for well over 50 years now (yes it REALLY is that old) people, and in the example below even companies, still don’t get how to use the BCC – or Blank Carbon Copy – header properly.
The BCC header, as the name suggests sends the email to the recipients, but unlike TO and CC the other recipients can’t also see who else has been BCC’ed in.
This is obviously very beneficial when sending the same email to many people and for privacy you shouldn’t be disclosing everyone else’s email address.
I recently received an email from T-mobile UK which did exactly this. A mass email to numerous people, and everybody was in the TO. Details include full names, email addresses and even some phone numbers.
SMTP – which underlies what most people understand as “email” – was first defined in RFC788 in 1981 as well as RFC821 and RFC822 in 1982, but BCC didn’t make an appearance in the SMTP specification until RFC2821 and RFC2822 in 2001.
So not quite since the 1960s then 🙂