How to Hide Email Addresses When Sending to a Group

Often, in our line of work, we need to send a common email message to multiple recipients some of whom may not be known to each other. In such situations, you enter their email addresses in the CC field where all the email addresses are blatantly visible to all the recipients. It doesn’t bode well to display everyone’s email address in the email as some people may be offended or upset to see their email address being circulated about without their knowledge. If you find yourself in a situation where sending email messages to multiple recipients, I’ll show you how to hide email addresses when sending mail to a group of recipients in Outlook 2010.

Sending email to many recipients can be done just by using the Bcc field, I hear you say. But when you add an email address to the Bcc field, you are basically instructing the mail server to remove the address label before delivering the email to the recipients. That means when the recipient opens the email he or she won’t be able to see who else has received the email. The trouble with this system is that when you put all the email addresses onto the Bcc field, the message has a good chance of getting caught in the spam folder. And many of the recipients may just end up missing it altogether.

How to Hide Email Addresses When Sending to a Group

As always, there is a workaround to this problem. You’ll need to use your own email address in the To field, and add the rest of the email addresses in the Bcc field and in the following steps, we’ll see how to hide email recipients without a hassle.

1. Launch Outlook 2010 and click the Contacts icon at the bottom of the Navigation pane.

2. On the Home tab, in the New group, click New Contact.

3. In the Full Name text box, enter a name. You can simply say “Undisclosed recipients” but any other name should do just as well.

4. In the E-mail text box, enter your email address.

5. On the Contact tab, in the Actions group, click Save & Close.

6. Now, go back to the bottom of the Navigation pane and click Mail.

7. On the Home tab, in the New group, click New Email.

8. In the To field, enter the email address you just created.

9. You will notice that by default the Bcc field is not enabled. Select the Options tab and in the Show Fields group, click Bcc.

10. Add the email addresses of all the people you want to send this email message to. You can either click the Bcc button and selecting them from the Contact list, or by enter them manually. Since Autocomplete feature is usually enabled, typing the first few characters of the name should instantly pull up the email address.

Note: You can also create a mailing list in Outlook 2010 to instantly send an email to a group of people.

Note: Avoid sending the email to more than 20 recipients at a time as some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) may limit the number of people you can send one email to and you don’t want your message to be undelivered to a bunch of people.

Downloadable:

PDF Copy of Tutorial:How to Hide Email Addresses When Sending to a Group

Now that you know how to hide email addresses when sending mail to a group of people, you can avoid the pitfalls of misusing the Bcc field and accomplish the job with no problems.