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B.c.c. and reply to all

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renluop:
Friend is  chairman of a society, and the matter of B.c.c came up. He also mentioned the reply to all option, and I said that meant that every one, who had been sent the email he had received, would get his reply. Then he queried, if reply to all on a received B.c.c could get to only the sender or others too.

I thought, no, as the headers and message source details would only be his and the senders, but am I right?

jelv:
Reply to all will only go to the original sender, prime recipient(s) and CC recipients - it will not go BCC recipients because (as you correctly identified) their details will NOT be anywhere in the message.

d2d4j:
Hi renulop

Bcc is blind carbon copy, so anyone  replies or replies all would only reply to sender and not everyone unlike cc (carbon copy), which would send to all but CC would show everyone’s email address in the CC whereas BCC would only show senders email and the recipient

Many thanks

John

sevenlayermuddle:
My own understanding is that “Reply to all” will actually be implementation dependent, at the whim of the authors of the mail client. ie Outlook client might or might not behave the same as (say) thunderbird.

That said, I think it is a reasonable assumption that “reply to all” will reply to all other recipients that are visible to the person replying.   A person who was BCC’d is not normally visible to a person who was CC’d, hence a CC’d person’s response would not be sent to a BCC.  Whereas a BCC’s response would be sent to other CC’s, but not other BCC’s. :)

sevenlayermuddle:
PS:  Just tried it,with an experiment comprised of my (many!) email addresses.

"test" message sent, using gmail, to a CC and a BCC.

The BCC could see the sender, as well as the CC.  The CC could only see the sender.

"Reply to all" (using MacOS client) from the BCC went to both the sender, and the CC.

The main purpose of BCC really should be when you want to keep somebody "in the loop", allowing them to know what has been said about a larger group, without allowing others to know the BCC is in the loop.   For example, I might (and have) send a complaint about a safety defect to an appliance manufacturer, BCC'ing a consumer body, such as BBC TTV 'Watchdog'.    But in that example, if BBC Watchdog should decide to contribute then their cover is blown, that would be their decision.

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