How Do I View The BCC Recipients On An Email I've Received?

Who else got this email?

by Leo A. Notenboom

BCC is a way to send copies of email without all recipients being visible. But can you still view the BCC'ed?

Question: I want to find the list of “undisclosed recipients” of the email I’ve received. Is there a way?

No.

“Undisclosed recipients” shows in the “To:” line when the message being sent has no entries in the “To:” or “Cc:” fields. The sender has used the “Bcc:” feature to email one or more people without revealing who they are.

So how do you find out who they are?

Viewing the BCC Field

The BCC feature, or Blind Carbon Copy, is designed specifically not to reveal who has been BCC’ed to any of the recipients of an email. You cannot see who was BCC’ed.

BCC: Blind Carbon Copy1

Say you’re emailing a customer, and you want to send a copy of that email to someone else — perhaps your boss — without it being evident on the outgoing email. Adding that someone to either the “To:” or “Cc:” lines would be obvious: your boss’s email address would be listed in the email sent to your customer.

BCC emails someone without their name being on the email at all. That’s what “blind” is all about: you can’t see that they’ve been sent the email. In fact, recipients of the email can’t tell whether anyone was BCC’ed or not. You can’t view the BCC field because the information isn’t included in the message.

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Undisclosed recipients

BCC is usually used in addition to whoever is addressed on the “To:” or “Cc:” lines, but that’s not a requirement. You can send an email message with only BCC’ed recipients.

When that happens, some email programs automatically put the phrase “undisclosed recipients” (or something similar) in the “To:” line to show that this was on purpose: the email was sent to one or more people without revealing who they are.

Disclosing undisclosed recipients

This brings us back to the original question: how do you find out who the email was sent to?

You don’t.

That’s the whole point of BCC. That’s what “undisclosed” means. You can’t view the people who were BCC’ed. The information about who the email was sent to is not included in the email. There is no way of determining if it was sent to anyone else, and if so, who.

Old exceptions

Once upon a time, there were email programs that got the whole concept of BCC:/undisclosed recipients wrong. They included the BCC’ed recipients in normally hidden headers anyone could read if they knew how. But that was a bug that has long since been resolved.

Similarly, it’s conceivable that corporate email systems could also somehow expose BCC’ed recipients, but these are systems where everyone is on the same email system, so the email does not travel across internet email servers.

Do this

There’s nothing you can do. Today’s email programs don’t disclose undisclosed recipients.

Instead, Subscribe to Confident Computing! Less frustration and more confidence, solutions, answers, and tips in your inbox every week.

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Footnotes & References

1: Occasionally also “Blind Courtesy Copy” after the concept of carbon paper was lost on many. Look it up, kids.