Replying To an Email That May Have a Bcc In It, Who Sees My Reply?

Comments: One Response to “Replying To an Email That May Have a Bcc In It, Who Sees My Reply?”

Gary Rosenzweig

8 years ago

The short answer: No. When you get an email that has been BCCed to others, the email does not contain the information about those BCCed people. It can't. If it did, then it would be easy to view the source of the email and see who else got it, defeating the purpose of BCC. So when you reply, there is no way that your email app can even know their email addresses, or that it was even sent to those people. It simply can't reply to them, only to the original reply-to email address (usually the sender) and maybe to other "to" and CC email addresses if you select "reply to all." But it cannot know about any BCCed people so it can't reply to them.
So imagine A sends an email to B and also BCCs 17 others including yourself. All you get in your email is that it was from A to B and you were BCCed. The email contains no information about the other 16 people, or even that it was BCCed to 16 people. When you reply normally, the reply goes to A. If you reply to all, it goes to A and B. But never the 16 other people.
That's if the email is sent by a normal person in a normal way.
But what if the email is part of an email group (Google groups, Yahoo groups, corp server groups, etc)? This is not the same as BCC and BCC is not being used. But the email appears to come from one person and has a reply to the group email address. You don't see who else gets the email, which makes it similar to BCC. However, with most groups you can usually go somewhere (webpage) and see who is in the group. When you reply to this email, it goes to that group email address and everyone on the list will get a copy. That's the whole point of the group email list, of course, is that everyone sees all of the email. This is very different from person sending an email and using BCC, but I thought it was worth mentioning.