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"Undisclosed-Recipients" may be placed in the To: field by mail programs or ISPs if the To: field is empty. It's not standard and not in your control.
When using BCC to send out emails from Outlook Express, the recipient should see "Undisclosed-Recipient;" in the TO field. However, the recipients in my BCC list that I sent out see my own (the sender) email instead. Eventually, it is showing as FROM: myemail@domain.com, TO: myemail@domain.com. How do I get it to display "Undisclosed-Recipients:;" in the TO field?
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I don't believe that it's something you can force.
By that, I mean I don't believe the exact phrase "Undisclosed-Recipients;" is any kind of standard or something that you can put in place yourself.
I don't think it's even controlled by the sender of the email.
I'll show you what I do instead.
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Using BCC
BCC is a way to send email to someone without their email address appearing in the To: or Cc: line. It's considered a polite way to send email to a large number of people without exposing everyone's email address. It's also often a "cover your behind" approach in business allowing you to secretly include a superior or other recipient on an email message.
In some cases, you'll want to send a message to only BCC'ed recipients. The To: and the Cc: fields of the message that you're composing would remain empty.
That's technically valid, although some email programs react differently to the lack of a public recipient.
The required To:
Your email program may require that you put an email address in the To: field.
There's really no way around this. Not only is something required, but it must be an email address.
There are two ways to deal with this:
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Put in an email address that you know is invalid. It has to look like a valid email address, but that's all. When you send your message, you may get a bounce for that email address, which you can ignore.
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Put in a valid email address. I typically use my own. The email is From: me and To: me, with a number of BCC'ed recipients who never see any email addresses on the message except for mine.
I typically recommend the later. It's pretty obvious that when you get a message on which you are not listed as a recipient that you - and possibly others - were BCC'ed.
The blank To:
If your email program does not require you to place a valid-looking email address in the To: line, then several things can happen when you send the mail:
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Your email program may add the phrase "Undisclosed recipients," or something like it, in the "To:" line.
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The email program of some of your BCC'ed recipients may display the phrase "Undisclosed recipients", or something like it, in the "To:" line.
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The email program of some of your BCC'ed recipients may do nothing, and simply display an empty To:
Again, all of this is pretty much out of your control.
Recommendation
Having an empty "To:" line is actually a mark against your email when it comes to making it through various spam filters, so I'd recommend putting something there.
It's unclear if having the recipient be the same as the sender is a mark against you or not. I tend to think not, because it's common to do so for exactly the reasons that we're dealing with here.
Thus, my ultimate recommendation is to send the email "To:" yourself and BCC all the recipients whom you want to keep from seeing each other's email addresses.
(This is an update to an article originally published May 30, 2004.)
Article C1958 - May 16, 2012
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
@C. Ward
Posted by: Mark J at July 21, 2011 10:19 PMIf you didn't send the email,you can't view the BCC.The purpose of BCC is to prevent the recipients from seeing who else received the email.
I make a new email contact.
First name: Undisclosed
Last name: Recipients
Email Address: my own
This sends me a copy of the email, but keeps my friends' email addys private when I send to multiple people by using the "bcc" field.
Posted by: Maggie Jay at March 5, 2012 7:13 PMIf you put "Undisclosed recipients " (without the quotation marks), you'll get just what you want. At least it works for me in Outlook 2003.
I frequently use modifications of this to indicate to blind copy recipients why they are receiving the email. For example: "Choir members " or "Society mailing list ".
Posted by: Martin Tarr at May 18, 2012 8:36 AMI've used Mozilla's Thunderbird for years, and most often the entire list of my email recipients are posted with BCC. I don't need to do anything else to get the desired privacy for my friends' addresses. And the amt. of spam has dropped dramatically. I also end each email document with this signature: "I have entered your personal email address in the BCC: (Blind Carbon Copy) column and not in the To: or Cc: column so your email address is always hidden from spammers and everyone else...If you are about to forward this or any other mail I send, will you please do me the courtesy and delete any visible address before you hit the send icon...
Posted by: Larry at May 18, 2012 2:14 PMI use only Bcc when forwarding mail, but when I send to many recipients I use a special program for that. I send email to 235 members of our sporting club, and use a special email sender program, which lets me send a certain number of emails (like 10 or 15) then pause for 10 seconds, then send the next 15, and pause again, until they are all sent. I have a spreadsheet of all members and it pulls the columns I choose for "Hi, (first name) and the column for the email address. Works great, and my ISP does not send me any warning of spaming. Much better than grinding thru email address books.
Posted by: Techthom Smith at May 18, 2012 5:12 PM