A common mistake that we see over and over again is the use of multiple e-mail addresses in the address field in your e-mail program. Nearly every e-mail client and system in the world offers three key fields with which you address your recipient. You have the TO: field, the CC: field, and the BCC: field, the latter of the three being the most important when it comes to sending bulk messages.
The TO: Field. When you use the TO: field, you broadcast not only your message, but the e-mail address of every recipient that you’ve sent the message to. Only use the TO: field when you intend to achieve this result. But, be courteous to the owners of that e-mail address. When you send a message to 50 people in your address book by using the TO: field, entering each address individually, it’s like writing every recipient’s home address on every party invitation you send in the mail. It takes up space, and it broadcasts to the world everyone’s e-mail address.
The CC: Field. The CC: field is useful when you want the recipient of your message to know that you have included other people in your transmission. Those to whom you’ve CC’d will know that they are not the primary recipient, and that you are simply sending them an FYI, and you’re letting the recipient(s) know that those people have been made aware of the content of your message. Again, these addresses are broadcast to the world, so don’t jam the CC: field full of addresses.
The BCC: field. This field is used to mask the addresses from the other recipients. It is very useful when you send out 50, 100, or even thousands of messages as each recipient will see that the message was sent only to them, and they will not see the other recipients.
Groups. When you have a large group of people that you repeatedly send e-mail to, create a distribution list or a group of addresses and give it a name. For instance, “newsletter recipients” is a name given to a list of 2000 people within your distribution group. When you send the newsletter out, all you add to the BCC: field (because you don’t want to broadcast their e-mail to the world) is the name of the “newsletter recipient” group.