Blind Carbon Copy Feature

Do you send e-mail to group lists or groups of students? You should use the “BCC” or Blind Carbon Copy feature of e-mail to protect recipients’ e-mail addresses and privacy. You can put either an e-mail list name, or individual e-mail addresses in the BCC field.

When you use BCC instead of To or CC, a student sees only his/her name/e-mail in the To or CC field instead of a list of other students. This protects the student in several ways.

Why Use Blind Carbon Copy

• No other recipient sees the student’s email address, thus protecting personal information as FERPA requires;
• No other recipient knows that the student belongs to the category/group of recipients (e.g. if the e-mail is for non-payment, one recipient should not know who else is in this category); Students don’t receive a long list of e-mail addresses they could re-use to contact others for non-college purposes;
• Some viruses harvest e-mail addresses from the To and CC fields.
• You can also use BCC when the To list is long; recipients don’t have to scroll down to see the message; so BCC can be useful even when there are not privacy issues.

Good Practices

• You can leave the To field blank.
• Start your e-mail with a statement of who the recipient group is: “To all Verizon Corporate College students” or “You are receiving this e-mail because you have outstanding library fines”

If other college staff need to be notified that this e-mail was sent, use the CC field, or forward a copy of the sent mail.