Blind Carbon Copy Feature

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

When you use BCC instead of To or CC, a student sees only his/her name/email 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 email is for non-payment, one recipient should not know who else is in this category); Students don’t receive a long list of email addresses they could re-use to contact others for non-college purposes;
• Some viruses harvest email 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 email with a statement of whom the recipient group is: “To all Verizon Corporate College students” or “You are receiving this email because you have outstanding library fines.”

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