Outlook & BCC: Secure?

[(PeteCresswell)]

I want to send the same message to about 100 people - but, in the
interest of privacy, do not want each person on the list to see
the other 99 addresses. My address, no problem, but I don't
want to spew other peoples addresses out there.

Question: Will BCC adequately conceal the addresses? Or do I
need to compose/send a separate message for each person?

 

[macropod]

Hi Pete,

You can answer this for yourself, by right-clicking on a BCC email you've received, selecting Properties > Details > Message source
and looking at the list of 'To:' email addresses. How many do you see?

 

[JP]

Yes, but you can always do a mail merge.

--JP

 

[Clif McIrvin]

I want to send the same message to about 100 people - but, in the
interest of privacy, do not want each person on the list to see
the other 99 addresses. My address, no problem, but I don't
want to spew other peoples addresses out there.

Question: Will BCC adequately conceal the addresses? Or do I
need to compose/send a separate message for each person?

Will doing so either
1) fail to send becuase your ISP rejects 100 addresses in a single send
as spam or
2) cause the email to get coded as "bulk" and thus either filtered out
by a recepient's ISP and not delivered at all or dumped into his
junk/spam folder?

I don't know of any way to definitively test for #2; #1 you could test
by BCC'ing yourself 100 times and examining the headers of your received
message.

I'd vote for mail merge, I think.

 

[(PeteCresswell)]

Per macropod:

You can answer this for yourself, by right-clicking on a BCC email you've received, selecting Properties > Details > Message source
and looking at the list of 'To:' email addresses. How many do you see?

That tells me how many a clueless noob like me sees.

But it doesn't tell me how many somebody who knows what they are
doing might be able to extract - the assumption being that there
may be information in the (SMTP?) data format that are not shown
in the UI of whatever mail reader I might be using.

Sounds to me like mail/merge time.

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Per macropod:

That tells me how many a clueless noob like me sees.

That also shows you the raw data that the recipient of the email gets from the mail server.
In other words, it's the full content of the email, sans any interpretation, prettification
etc.

The entire *point* of BCC is to enable you to send messages to multiple recipients without
sharing the recipient list with any of them. If the bcc'd email included the recipient list
or any part of it, it'd be a *serious* bug in the email program.

 

[Chirag]

I want to send the same message to about 100 people - but, in the
interest of privacy, do not want each person on the list to see
the other 99 addresses. My address, no problem, but I don't
want to spew other peoples addresses out there.

Question: Will BCC adequately conceal the addresses?

Yes, but you need to ensure that you put atleast one email address in the To
field - typically your own email address. The protocol states that in the
absence of a To field, all addresses from the BCC field are exposed to all
recipients.

- Chirag

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