As a rule of thumb, if the number of recipients exceeds 30, then you should Bcc. The worst time to use Bcc is at work. It's shady to lead someone to believe they are the only recipient of an email when they are not. The cc "carbon copy" connotes the same thing as the "Bcc" -- the cc'd person is on the email but is not expected to respond -- but it does so openly.
If you need to copy your boss on an email, copy your boss, but don't pretend they aren't copied. In personal correspondence, a bad time to use Bcc is when sending an invitation to a party. Are your friends spies? Can their identities not be revealed to your other friends? Are your friends so famous that your other friends will stalk them if they know their email addresses? Bcc'ing in this instance can make you look insecure and offend your friends.
Insecure because it seems like you want to keep who you are inviting to the party a secret, because A it'a a big party with a good number of losers invited, or B it's a small party with few people invited, but some of them are definitely losers.
Don't try to pull the wool over your friends' eyes! It's nice to see who else is invited to a party because then you know how many losers will be there! Bcc'ing on an invite email makes intimate events among friends seem like corporate events. Recently, I saw this play out. Join thousands of subscribers in the Leadership Insights community for a regular diet of ideas to fuel your success. Disclosure of Material Connection: I may have received one or more of the products or services I have written about for free in the hope that I would mention it on my blog.
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All rights reserved. Privacy Policy Disclaimer Permissions Policy. Subscribe today and receive a free e-book. Subscribe to Leadership Insights , the blog that transforms. Related posts. Skip Prichard Meet Skip. And it has the biggest risk for pitfalls. Carbon copies were common in pre-internet days. When someone needed a copy of a document, they inserted a sheet of carbon paper between two pieces of paper. The carbon paper helped the ink or type move from the top sheet to the bottom, and presto, you had two copies of the same paperwork.
These days, an email CC means you sent a copy of a message to someone other than the direct recipient — it's an easy way to keep vested parties in the loop on a subject. Notably, the CC format allows everyone to see each other's email addresses, too. BCC works the same way as CC, except the direct recipient in the "To" line doesn't know that anyone was copied on the message.
So, for example, if you emailed a subordinate at work about being late to the office and BCC'd your own boss to show her that you were being diligent about tardiness, your subordinate wouldn't know that her lateness was being pointed out to your own superior. Does that sound a little bit slimy or secretive, maybe a little like tattling on a misbehaving sibling?
It should. You could call BCC the "backstabbing carbon copy," because its usage is often loaded with etiquette pitfalls and potential backlash. After all, if you're purposely hiding the fact that there are BCC recipients, maybe you should question your motives. Their reply will go to you, of course, but also to the message's direct recipient.
This kind of abrupt disclosure has resulted in countless tense office scenarios. The takeaway? In spite of these issues, there are some very good reasons to use BCC.
Maybe you're a supervisor of various contract or freelance workers who never interact with each other, and you want to update all of them on policy changes without having to send individual emails. To do so, you can send them all a message with just the BCC section filled in with their addresses.
This isn't just a matter of convenience for you — it also protects the privacy of your freelancers, who probably don't want a bunch of virtual strangers to see their personal email address.
Or maybe you're a company trying to contact many customers about an important issue. You absolutely have to use BCC, otherwise hundreds or thousands of people will suddenly see private email addresses. That's a major breach of trust.
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