Why you should use Blind Copy (BCC)
What is Blind Copy?
Blind Copy allows the sender to send an email to someone and let someone else see the email without others knowing they got the email. Here is an example.
I send an email from me@xyz.com to Tim@xyz.com, John@xyz.com. I carbon copied (CC) Bob@xyz.com and blind copied (BCC) Steve@xyz.com, and Roy@xyz.com with subject hello and the body says you won.
Tim, John, and Bob would see each other's email address and they would know that the others got the email. However they would not see Steve's email or Roy's email. They won't know that Steve or Roy got the email. The only person that would know Steve and Roy got the email would be the sender. Also Steve won't know Roy got the email and won't see Roy's email address. Roy will not see Steve's email address.
When you send an email using just the to or the CC everyone sees the email addresses. That doesn't seem like a big deal but it can. There are spammers out there that will get people's email addresses from email and send spam to them. You think that won't happen because you only send the email to friends but you don't know what happens after you send it. For example
You send an email to John and Steve
Steve forwards the email to Mary. Now Mary sees Your email address, John's email and Steve's. Mary sends it to all he friends. Her friends forwards the emails before you know it there is 500 email addresses on the emails and it reaches someone that sells email addresses or spams them.
If you use BCC (blind copy) then people's email addresses are protected. If Steve deletes all the email addresses before he sends it and sends it as BCC than no one's email address will be compromised but yours. If you are sending a chain letter such as a joke or something use an email address that you don't use for correspondence. You can have more than one email address. Create you an email address for this purpose. If a spammer gets that email address it won't hurt you because it is not the email address you use.
To use the BCC do the following (This is for Outlook but applies to other email programs also)
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Type in your email address in the To field (Use one that you don't want spam from. If you don't have one there is numerous places to get a free email address from such as hotmail, yahoo and others)
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Put the email addresses you want to get this email in the BCC field (when they get the email, the will see your email address but won't see each other's email address)
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If this is a forwarded email (as in the example above), delete the section that shows the previous emails (I have it in red above).