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"Forward to": An Alternative to Bcc

Bccing is dangerous: if you Bcc someone and he replies all, he reveals to everyone that he was Bcc’d.

But the Bcc field can be useful. Sometimes you want to show an email to a third party without the main recipient knowing — either because it’d be embarrassing (e.g., “Here’s the criticism I gave Tom, let me know if I was too harsh”) or just irrelevant (e.g., indicating to someone that he doesn’t have to reply to a customer support email because you just did)

In these cases you have to:

  1. Send the email
  2. Click on “Sent mail”
  3. Re-open the email
  4. Forward it to the third party

Instead, you should have a field called “Forward to”:

In this case, Rich would automatically get forwarded a copy of my email right after it gets sent (with my comment at the top).

Posted March 15th, 2010