Blind Carbon Copy - Definition and Overview

In the context of email, blind carbon copy refers to the practice of sending a message to multiple recipients in such a way that what they receive does not contain the complete list of recipients.

There are a number of reasons why you might want to do this:

- To send a copy of your correspondence to a third party (for example a colleague) when you don't want to let the recipient know that you're doing this (or when you don't want the recipient to know the third party's email address).

- When sending an email to multiple recipients, you can hide their email addresses from each other. This is a sensible anti-spam precaution, because it avoids making a long list of email addresses available to all the recipients (which is what happens if you put everyone's address in the 'cc:' or 'to:' fields). For this reason, it often makes sense to use bcc: for mailing list.

'Bcc' is also occasionally used to make certain types of spam email look more convincing - by hiding your email, the spammer may hope to trick you into believing you've accidentally received an email (about some amazing one-off bargain that will make you millions) that wasn't intended for you.

The acronym bcc is often used to refer to blind carbon copy.

See also

• carbon copy (cc)