You’re a snivelling grass. You want to reprimand a colleague for photocopying their buttocks, and you want to copy in the boss without them knowing you’ve copied in the boss. But your snitching has been foiled, because you can’t find the sodding bcc field. Where’s it gone? Here’s how to add a bcc field to Outlook emails.
How to add the bcc field to Outlook emails
Assuming you’re using the latest update of Outlook 2016 on Windows, this is actually dead simple.
Click the New Email button in the top left of the screen. In the email window that opens, click the Options tab in the menu along the top. Now select Bcc in the Show Fields section, and the field should appear in all future emails.
Bcc, in case you don’t know, stands for blind carbon copy. It lets you send a copy of the message to someone without the recepient’s knowledge. That’s different from a plain old cc, where everyone included in the message gets to see who else received the message. If you’re sending out a message to multiple business clients or customers, it’s normally regarded as good form to use the bcc field, so that you don’t end up handing out people’s email addresses to all and sundry.
If you’re using Outlook on Android/iOS, you might be slightly confused by the cc/bcc field in the new email window, as shown below:
Recipients can’t be both cc and bcc at the same time, for obvious reasons! Relax – that’s not a single field. If you click into it, you’ll find the field splits in two, allowing you to enter cc and bcc recipients separately. It’s not the greatest bit of user interface design from Microsoft, but fairly simple to understand after the first time you use it.
Now read this: what can you do if Outlook search returns no results?
Main image credit: Adikos/Flickr
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