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Use BCC Instead For Thunderbird For Better Email Privacy

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 12:15:22 +0000

When it comes to sending emails to multiple recipients you have several options at your disposal. The most common options are to use To, CC or BCC for that. The first two options may cause a privacy issue as they reveals all recipient’s email addresses to all recipients. That may not be a problem if you are sending out emails in a company or organization but may very well be one if recipients do not have anything to do with each other. One example where this could be a problem are the giveaways that I hold here on Ghacks regularly. I usually have to email ten or even more winners of licenses and it would not really make sense to let everyone see each others email addresses in the those emails.

Use BCC Instead is a Mozilla Thunderbird extension. It works almost like the native attachment warnings that you get when you use words like attached in the email body or subject without attaching a file to the email.

The extension warns you whenever you send emails to multiple recipients using either To or CC instead of BCC.

Please note that the extension warns you about sending the email to multiple To or CC recipients. It gives you the option to go ahead and send it anyway or to click cancel to modify the parameters to BCC. It does not auto-correct the issue.

The default limit is set to 10, which means that you only get warnings if you send out emails to more than ten recipients using To or CC. You can change that in the options, for instance to 1 which would always warn you when To or CC is used.

You can furthermore block emails from being send out at all if the selected value is exceeded.

Thunderbird users can download Use BCC Instead from the official Mozilla extension repository.

Personalize E-Mail Messages With BCC This

Martin Brinkmann — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 09:47:31 +0000

E-Mails can be send to one or multiple users. A problem arises when sending out mails to multiple users as there is no way of personalizing emails for individual recipients except for using scripts that need to be added to the email. (Thunderbird can for instance do that with the mass mail and personal mail add-ons). It is for instance common courtesy to address each recipient with their name which is impossible to do without scripting.

But that process is rather complicated and time consuming. BCC This is a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that offers an ingenious way of personalizing email messages that are send out to multiple recipients.

The Outlook plugin basically allows a user to add custom text to selected recipients. The plugin is in no way as sophisticated as the Thunderbird add-ons mentioned above but it can be used to add textual information that only some recipients will receive.

It would have been nice if BCC This allowed to add messages to different recipients but this is as of now not possible. The add-on is therefor unsuitable for mass mailings but ideal for conversations in a work environment with only a few recipients.

BCC This adds a toolbar at the bottom of the message writing window in Outlook. This toolbar can be minimized whenever it is not needed to save screen estate. Recipients can read the email messages normally while BCC This offers the means to view the messages how they have been send out on the sender’s system.

BCC This is currently offered as a free beta version not only for Outlook but also for Twitter and Blackberries. No compatibility information are given on the developer’s website.

Automated Email Archiving and Monitoring In Microsoft Outlook

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:35:03 +0000

It is sometimes important to monitor and archive emails, especially in a business environment. One example would be that a supervisor wants a copy of every email that an employee sends to customers to keep track on everything. Probably the easiest way of achieving this is to add the supervisor as a cc or bcc recipient in the emails. This is supported by all modern email clients be they web based such as Gmail, Microsoft Live Mail and Yahoo Mail or desktop based such as Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook.

The Outlook Auto BCC / CC add-in has been designed specifically for Microsoft Outlook. It allows the installation of automatic bcc and cc recipients in email messages based on rules. Possibilities include setting a rul for all outgoing emails from all email accounts, messages send to specific email addresses or messages that match specific phrases in the subject or attachment.

It is furthermore possible to create exceptions to rules so that certain email addresses and emails do not get archived or monitored.

This is an excellent solution for email archiving as well as it it unproblematic to send all emails to another email account for backup purposes. It would for example be possible to create a backup Gmail account and add that new email account as a BCC recipient for all email messages that are send from Microsoft Outlook. Another interesting option is to configure the Microsoft Outlook add-in so that only emails that contain specific keywords or phrases are send to another recipient.

The main benefit of this email archiving and monitoring solution is that the user behind the monitor does not has to remember to add a BCC or CC recipient as the Outlook add-in manages all aspects of this automatically.

Auto BCC / CC is compatible with Microsoft Outlook 2007, Outlook 2003, Outlook XP (2002) and Outlook 2000.

Mails sent with BCC did not reach recipients ?

Martin Brinkmann — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 14:01:27 +0000

Emails can be send to several recipients at once by using the CC or BCC fields which send a Carbon Copy or Blind Carbon Copy to the recipients listed there. Using the BCC option is useful if you want that every recipient is only able to see his email address and not the email of everyone else who receives a message.

This is also a privacy issues and some will be really angry if you do not send mails to multiple recipients this way. It happens however that not all messages receive the recipient listed in the BCC field. This can be the case if you did not add a recipient in the TO field as well.

Some mail programs and filters block messages that have no TO recipient. The easiest workaround is to add your own email address to the to field which should take care of all the mail filters and programs that filter the mails otherwise.