Sending emails to a list of people can inadvertently give your friend's email addresses to people that were never supposed to get them when your email is forwarded by one of your friends to another group of people, and then on to another group, etc.

When you send twenty of your friends an email showing all twenty email addresses and those people forward that email to twenty of their friends, suddenly 400 people now have your friend's email addresses.
These email addresses remain in the email and many people don't edit them out.

Ever wonder how your email address gets on those spam lists? This is one way.

For more on this, check out this page: http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/web1/bcc_field.htm

My suggestion regarding emails to groups of people who do not know each other - rather than putting all the addresses in the "To:" box, put your address in the "To:" box, and use the "BCC:" box for your list so the mailing list is hidden. This works in most email programs - Eudora, Hotmail, Netscape, Earthlink, Yahoo.

In AOL, this seems to be more difficult since it apparently does not have a BCC. To do this, enclose the addresses in your To: or CC: textbox with parentheses, like this:

(ScreenName1, ScreenName2, ScreenName3, Person@domain.com, Person@domain.net)


If the BCC Feature Is Missing in Outlook Express:
This can occur because after you upgrade Outlook Express 4.x to Outlook Express 5 or later, the view "All Headers" may go away. To resolve this issue and enable the BCC feature, click New Mail , and then click All Headers on the View menu.

In Juno, you can use the "CC" box, and put parentheses around each name or around the group, with the names separated by commas. Put your own address in the TO box.

In Pegasus - By default, Pegasus mail does include these addresses, however. If you want to protect these recipients' privacy you need to tweak Pegasus Mail's settings.
To hide Bcc recipients with Pegasus Mail open the preferences dialog via Tools | Options... from the menu and go to the Outgoing mail | Sending mail category. Make sure the check box next to Suppress BCC field listings in outgoing mail is ticked and close the dialog by clicking OK.

Note: If you send the e-mail to yourself, the BCC addresses may not be hidden. This is so you know to whom you sent it. Don't worry, everyone else will get the mail with the BCC addresses hidden.

Note2: Some ISP's won't let you send only to BCC. If you try to send to only to BCC and your ISP bounces your email, you may need to put at least one address in the "To" field. Here is a trick: use your own address in the "To" field. You can either put your own address directly, or, if you want to be even more clever, create an address in your own address book to use.