Want to send an email to undisclosed recipients?

The undisclosed recipients feature keeps your email recipients’ details confidential by hiding them from your other email recipients. 

In this article, you’ll learn how to use the BCC field to send emails to undisclosed recipients.

However, the BCC method has always had limitations.
That’s why I’ll also give you a simpler way to email groups of people while keeping their details private by using a free mail merge program.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

Use the links to jump to a specific section:

• What Are Undisclosed Recipients?
• How to Send an Email to Undisclosed Recipients
• Three Benefits of Using Undisclosed Recipients
• Three Problems with Using Gmail for Privacy
• A Simpler and More Professional Approach Than BCC

Here’s a breakdown of the terms I’ll be using in this article:

1. Recipient – the person who receives your email.
2. Primary recipient – refers to the main recipient of your email (the person addressed in the To field).
3. CC Carbon Copy recipients – refers to recipients that receive a copy of the email. They are included in the CC address field. They are visible to all the recipients in your email.
4. BCC Blind Carbon Copy recipients – refers to hidden recipients that receive a copy of the email. They are included in the BCC address field. BCC recipients are the same as undisclosed recipients.
5. Distribution list/mailing list – a list of email addresses to which you’re sending emails.

What Are Undisclosed Recipients?

An undisclosed recipient is a recipient whose email address is only visible to the sender. 

Nobody else in the email list — be it your primary recipient, CC’d recipients, or fellow BCC’d recipients — will be able to read an undisclosed recipient’s details.

How to Send an Email to Undisclosed Recipients in Gmail

Sending an email to undisclosed recipients with the Gmail client is easy.

But there’s a catch.
You have to include yourself as the primary recipient while including everyone else as BCC recipients. 

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to send an email to undisclosed recipients:

Step 1
To start, log in to your Gmail account and click “Compose” to open the Compose window.
Alternatively, if you’ve enabled keyboard shortcuts in your Gmail account, you can press the “c” key to open a new email.

Step 2
Type “Undisclosed recipients” in the To: field of the new message and include your own email address within angle brackets (<>).

For example, if your Gmail ID is [email protected], you must type Undisclosed recipients <[email protected]>.

Why include your own email address as “Undisclosed recipients”?
There’s nothing wrong with just typing your email ID in the To field of such emails. But when you do that, your recipients may find it awkward.

Why would someone address themselves in their own email, right?

To avoid this, you conceal your email ID under a term like “Undisclosed recipients.” However, you can also use other terms. For example, if you’re emailing your book club members, you can type “Book Club Members” instead of “Undisclosed recipients,” and then include your own email address within brackets (<>).

This is simply a form of email etiquette when you only have BCC recipients for your email.

Note – You can also create a new contact titled “Undisclosed Recipients” in your address book and then type your Gmail address in its Email field. As it’s now a saved contact, it’s far easier to add it whenever you compose an email for undisclosed recipients.

Step 3
Then, click the “BCC” button in the message window:

In the BCC field that appears, type the email addresses of the recipients who will be hidden. You can separate multiple addresses by using a comma, adding a space, or pressing the enter key.

Step 4
Compose the subject and text of your email message and click “Send” to send your message.

Note – When using Gmail for BCC recipients, Google adds a unique email header for each BCC recipient. This ensures that they only see their own address on receiving the message.

Three Benefits of Using Undisclosed Recipients in Your Email

1. Protects the Recipients’ Privacy

Using the BCC email feature to send your message can help maintain a recipient’s privacy. By including a recipient in the BCC line, their address remains hidden from all other recipients in the To, CC, and BCC fields.

This makes it a good option for group emails, where you don’t want recipients to know who else was added to the email, or you don’t want to reveal the email addresses of individuals in the group.

2. Protects Your Recipients’ from Spammers/Email Trackers

Sending mass emails to recipients in the To and CC fields may inadvertently expose them to spammers and malware.

How?

If spammers find your mailing list, they can send spammy, malicious emails to these addresses and even track them.

However, adding them as undisclosed recipients guards against this problem. As they’re only included in your BCC field, malware will find it harder to read their IDs.

3. Reduces the Possibility of Being Marked as Junk

Sometimes, spam filters deliver mail to a recipient’s junk folder if there are too many recipients in the To and CC fields. However, if you leave the To and CC field blank (by sending it to undisclosed recipients), you can bypass this risk.

Three Problems with the Blind Copy Method

1. Unintentional Reply All

A BCC’d recipient may click “Reply to All” instead of the “Reply” button when replying to your email. This can share their response to every address in the email chain resulting in:

1. An unintentional breach of privacy for that sender.
2. Tons of unrelated emails for the other recipients.

2. Improper for Formal Conversations

Remember, even if your undisclosed recipients can’t see the details of other recipients on the BCC list, they’ll know that they weren’t the only ones added. This can create a bad impression or even a sense of suspicion among your undisclosed recipients.

Why?

They’ll be busy wondering about the identities of the other undisclosed recipients instead of focusing on your mail! You should avoid using this for formal conversations, as it could lead to decreased trust in your correspondence.

3. Can’t Add Individual Recipients’ Names

Whether it is used in Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Mail, iPhone Mail, or any other mail server, the BCC feature doesn’t let users personalize their emails.

You can’t add a BCC recipient’s full name or reference their personal needs in your emails.

The reason?
If you mention their names, their identity is no longer hidden!

That’s why undisclosed recipients often receive generic emails that don’t address their personal needs and preferences. While this protects their privacy, it can limit your chances of making a connection with them. Moreover, they may wonder why you hid their identity in the first place.

A Simpler and More Professional Approach than BCC: GMass

What Is GMass?

GMass is a powerful mail merge program that makes it incredibly simple to send personalized emails to multiple recipients with your Gmail inbox.

Its mass emailing features have made it a popular Chrome extension that’s used by businesses, individuals, and groups like clubs, schools, and churches to send emails to multiple recipients from their email account.

If you’re looking to send bulk emails while protecting your recipients’ privacy, GMass can help you!

Why You Should Use GMass for Your Email Sending Needs

1. Quickly Add Tons of Recipients

Say you have a mailing list of 1,000 registered users of your product in Gmail.

When composing your email, manually adding each recipient can be time-consuming and error-prone. For example, you may leave out an email address or mistakenly include someone else in your email.

With GMass, this is no longer a problem.
GMass gives you two automated, error-free ways to include multiple recipients in seconds:

1. Use Google Contacts
   If you’re using Google Contacts, select the contacts you want as recipients, and GMass automatically adds them to the address field. It’s far more convenient than manually identifying and adding each recipient from your address book. (If you need help with your Gmail contact list, check out our extremely helpful step-by-step guide to Google Contacts.)
2. Use GMass’s Build Email List Feature
   The “Build Email List” lets GMass automatically identify your email recipients. Instead of manually searching through your address book to select an email ID, simply enter a search term in the Gmail search box, and GMass pulls up the details of all the relevant contacts. You can now easily add these IDs to your distribution list.
   For a detailed guide on how to use this feature, click here.

2. Add Names and Further Personalization to Your Emails

You can’t personalize an email for undisclosed recipients in your usual webmail client.

You can only create and send a generic email to all of them. However, doing this can limit your chances of making a personal connection.

Think about it.

You can’t expect too many people to subscribe to your service if you don’t even mention their names, right?

Luckily, GMass gives you a professional way to personalize your emails automatically. You can add personalization variables such as:

• {FirstName},
• {LastName},
• {Company}, to your emails.

The values of these variables are automatically determined by GMass from the recipient’s email ID and other data. This way, you can personalize each email without manually doing a thing!

GMass also provides you other personalization features like:

1. Auto First-Name Detection and Entry – GMass accurately auto-detects a person’s first name from their email address. This allows you to insert a recipient’s first name anywhere in your email.
2. Customize links and URLs – You can include customized links and URLs for each recipient in your email.
3. Include a personalized image – GMass lets you add a unique image for each recipient in your email.
4. Personalize entire paragraphs  – You can automatically customize large blocks of text on a person-by-person basis in your email messages.

Click here for a complete guide on email personalization in Gmail.

3. Easy Email Scheduling

GMass’s scheduling feature makes it incredibly easy to schedule your emails in advance.

How does this help?
You can send emails at specific times of the day to maximize email open rates. As you’ve already scheduled them, you won’t have to be online when they need to be sent.

Simply compose your email, decide when to send it, and GMass automatically sends it when the time arrives.

You can enter a custom date and time or choose from a set of default times to schedule your emails. Scheduled emails can also easily be rescheduled from the Drafts folder.

Conclusion

Using the BCC field to send emails to undisclosed recipients is risky, tedious, and ineffective.

Why settle for it when you have excellent email marketing tools available in 2024?

Smart email programs like GMass can quickly draft and send personalized emails to a large group of undisclosed recipients without compromising their privacy. Why not download the GMass mail merge extension and experience it yourself?

In the meantime, why not check out the other articles on this blog for more tips, tricks, and rules about email sending?