Precautions for the Bcc address

Some business situations might require that you send a private copy of an email to other mailboxes in addition to the one in the To: line. To send a copy of the email without notifying the addressee, add an email address in the Bcc: line of the email header.

For example, you might configure a Deliver document as a transactional email message that is sent to customers to confirm shipment of their order. To simultaneously notify other individuals (such as a regional support team or local distributor) that the merchandise is on its way, you can put the email address of the support team or distributor in the Bcc: line. If the email address might vary according to region or other characteristic, you can use a personalization field to provide the email address.

The system does not compare the email addresses that you enter in the Bcc: line to the global email suppression list, including addresses provided by personalization fields. When you add an email address to the Bcc: line, you risk sending email to addresses that are known to be invalid or that belong to individuals that have unsubscribed from your mailing list.

You can damage your email reputation if you send email to invalid addresses or to individuals that have unsubscribed. Make certain that any email address that you add to the Bcc: line is a valid email address and that the recipient has not unsubscribed or opted-out of your mailing lists.

Important: You must be extremely careful when adding an email address to the Bcc: line. This caution is especially true of bulk mailings. If you specify a static email address, the mailbox that you specify can receive very large volumes of inbound messages.

If you specify a static email address, the Bcc mailbox receives a copy of every message sent as part of the mailing. If your mailing contains a million email addresses, then one million email messages are delivered to the Bcc mailbox. However, if you specify an email address by using a personalization field, the system sends the Bcc mailbox a copy of every email where the metadata associated with the recipient includes a value for the personalization field.

For example, to provide a business partner with a blind copy of email sent to a portion of a million recipient mailing list, do the following.

Define a personalization field that maps to partner email address information in your marketing datamart.
Confirm that the OLT includes the personalization field for partner email.
Enter the personalization field in the Bcc: line of the email header.
Run the mailing.

If only 5000 of the one million records in the mailing list contain the partner's email address as the value for the personalization field for partner email (the one that you entered in the Bcc: line), the partner's mailbox receives 5000 email messages. Had you entered the partner's email as a static email address, the partner's mailbox would receive one million emails.