Name of Undisclosed Recipient on a BCC Email

F

Frank

My distribution list that is inserted into the Bcc space. My email address is
inserted into the To space.

The email is successfully reaching all of the people on my distribution
list. The problem is that the name that appears on the undisclosed
redcipients email is my name and not the recipients.

The email is going to the right place, but under the wrong name. Does
anybody know why this is happening?

Frank
 
B

Ben M. Schorr, MVP

V

VanguardLH

Frank said:
My distribution list that is inserted into the Bcc space. My email address is
inserted into the To space.

The email is successfully reaching all of the people on my distribution
list. The problem is that the name that appears on the undisclosed
redcipients email is my name and not the recipients.

The email is going to the right place, but under the wrong name. Does
anybody know why this is happening?

Frank

Many e-mail servers will not accept your e-mails if the To field is blank.
For that, the e-mail client may demand that the To field have something in
it. So create a new contact named "Undisclosed Recipients" which has your
e-mail address and use that contact in the To field when you send this type
of e-mail. Then define a rule that deletes any e-mails that you receive
with "Undisclosed Recipients" in the To header and where the From header has
your e-mail address (since you probably don't want to read a copy of these
e-mails). While Outlook Express will add "Undisclosed Recipients" to the To
header's value if it was left blank, Outlook doesn't do that because it is
not a valid e-mail value. It is also not illegal per RFCs to leave blank
the To and Bcc fields: the RFCs say the To field should appear once and that
Cc is optional but the don't require either has a non-blank value,
especially since those headers are NOT used to specify the recipient(s) to
your e-mail server but are just *data* that your e-mail client added in the
message in the headers section of it.

No one gets to see the Bcc value. There is no such header added to your
outbound e-mails. That is merely a *field* that is displayed in your e-mail
client's UI. When sending an e-mail, your client compiles an aggregate list
of recipients from its To, Cc, and Bcc *fields*. For each recipient, it
generates a separate RCPT-TO command that it sends to the e-mail server. It
then follows with a single DATA command to relay the body of your e-mail.
So the e-mail server sees a bunch of RCPT-TO commands followed by one DATA
command. Your recipients *never* see the list of RCPT-TO commands. That's
just between your client and your server.

Since the Bcc header is not added to your e-mail by your client, the
recipients cannot see to whom that e-mail was addressed. If you send to
multiple recipients, and unless you have permission from all of them to
divulge their e-mail address to anyone that you want at anytime, then be
polite and use the Bcc field to hide their e-mail address from all the other
recipients.
 

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