How to send an email to multiple people
There is a few ways to send emails to numerous recipients, starting from laborious ones, such as manually copying and sending each message manually to an effortless ones where you can use distribution list and mass mail to send out your messages in few clicks, but ending up with a messages where each recipient gets his own, customized copy and they don't see any of the other recipients or even know your message was a mass email in the
first place!
What does cc in a email mean
Cc means "Carbon copy" - meaning the user will get an exact same copy oft he email as the recipient in the To field and both the main recipient and the recipient of the copy will see each others' email addresess in the header fields To and Cc.
How to send email to multiple recipients without them knowing
Some might ask how to send an email without showing recipients. The most obvious solution would be to add just one recipient per message, but you can achieve the same by adding your email addresses into the BCC line instead of the TO line.
How to send a bcc email?
Either there will be separate lines for CC and BCC under the TO line in your existing email window or these should be a button or link next to the TO line showing something like "Show Cc and Bcc" - many email apps will let you set these lines to be visible by default if you need to use them often.
When you send an email to all recipients in BCC the recipients will not see the email addresses of others, instead the message will look as if it was sent to "Undisclosed recipients", making it obious the message was mass sent to a larger number of people and it's not a message just for you. While a valid option in personal setting, this can give an appearance of being a spam or unimportant message to your recipients. Send such message as mass mail is a much more professional option.
How to send mass email?
This can differ in different apps, but eM Client makes it very easy - you simply input your recipients' email addresses into the TO field and then instead of using the Send button you can click the downwards arrow to the right to open other Sending option. Select 'Send as Mass Mail' and eM Client will create a separate copy of the message for each recipient in the To field.
How to send mass email in outlook
With the desktop version of Microsoft Outlook you can use the mass mail (or mail merge) in a combination of creating your template in Word and your contact list in Excel and then use Outlook to link up, create and send out the messages. You can find the whole tutorial on Microsoft support's website - Use mail merge
to send bulk email messages.
But for personal use, this is very much taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
For the online Outlook webmail you will need to use the blind copy approach. How to blind copy in outlook? The BCC button is directly in the top right corner.
How to send mass email in gmail
Gmail is the most popular free email provider, and while it is great for sending emails directly, it is not the best solution for mass mailing in the proffesional
setting. While you can get add ons for Google sheets to replicate the mail merge of Microsoft Outlook, you might hit a wall one you try to send more than 500 emails per day - because that is what Gmail's limit is and after this, you need to wait 24 hours before being able to send emails again.
Gmail also has very strict guidelines on sending out mass mails, so if large part of your messages are marked as Spam or send to undeliverable addresses, you might end up with a temporarily disabled
account.
But for personal, small scale emailing you can of course use the CC and BCC functionality without fear.
How to cc someone in gmail?
The CC button is available in the top right corner of the new email window in Gmail webmail. You can also use the Ctrl + Shift + C to make the CC field show up.
If you need to learn how to blind cc in gmail, the BCC option is also in the top right and can be opened via Ctrl + Shift + B. Sending a message to numerous
contacts in the BCC line will show the undisclosed recipients gmail in the TO line.
Quite often we need to send the same email content to a number of different recipients and most people can manage to accomplish this task. There are genuine reasons for sending email in bulk quantities such as:
- You are a club secretary or administrator who regularly email meeting minutes, newsletters or notifications to members
- You have a regular marketing email that goes to a long list of clients or potential clients
- You keep contact with a number of family members via email
- You just want to broadcast an announcement to a group of people without the need to reproduce the content each time
There are a couple of things you need to be aware of when mass emailing and at the top of that list is the risk of running foul of spam legislation and second is the potential to be branded a spammer and have your IP address listed on some of the spam filtering black lists. The purpose of this article is not to educate you in those areas; you have a responsibility to ensure you are up to speed on those topics before you begin sending email. (Numerous commercial options are available for those wanting to send large volumes of email and those providers usually include facilities to handle the opt-in and opt-out requirements of the legislation, the staging of batch email and the formatting of content to produce a professional result. This article is intended for those who would normally send to less than 100 addresses.)
Why shouldn’t I just create an email and ‘cc’ it to everyone in my address book or a group of people in my address book?
A list of reasons not to do this could be quite long but here is the gist of it:
- some of your recipients may not like to see their address in the Cc bar of a mass mail out, especially when that email may be going to people they don’t know personally
- there are potential privacy issues with doing this that can have legal ramifications
- recipients with computers infected with malicious software could be a means of spreading those email addresses to other sources
- by essentially distributing lists of email addresses you are opening those addresses up to possible spam attacks
- you have no control over where your recipient could forward the contents of your email and therefore the email addresses of your recipients
How do I do it the right way?
It is really quite simple and is called the blind carbon copy or Bcc.
All modern email clients (programs such as Outlook Express, Outlook, Windows Mail etc) include an option to send email messages to an address or number of addresses by adding them to the ‘Bcc’ field of the address section of a composed email. Addresses added to the Bcc field are hidden from the recipient so that one recipient doesn’t see the addresses of the other recipients who are also receiving the email.
If you regularly need to send email to a group of recipients explore the features of your email client (program) to take advantage of options such as the ability to set up groups where you can add a selection of addresses from your address book to a group and then just send your newsletter to the group. You can then use your own address as the main address for the group, add this to the Bcc field of the newsletter and everyone receives a copy of the email without all the addresses attached.
That’s it – easy and simple – and you may stay friends with all those people receiving your email. If you need help settings things up you might find the links at the bottom of this article worth following.
P.S. If you don’t see the Bcc field when composing an email (usually directly beneath the Cc field) it may need to be selected for display in the ‘options’ or ‘view’ settings section of your email client.
Resources
Outlook Express Tips, Tricks and Secrets for Groups and Mailing Lists
How to Send an Email to Undisclosed Recipients
Articles about “email etiquette”