Which of the following should be placed between email addresses when sending an email to more than one recipient?

The Email Etiquette Series is all about writing emails that people love to read. So far, we have covered the common mistakes to avoid when writing professional emails as well as the points to focus on when writing an effective business email. In this blog post, we shall explore the little tricks that ensure you’re sending the email to the right people and in the right way. In other words, we shall try to understand how to use TO, CC and BCC fields correctly to define how the recipients should read your email.

An Overview of the Email Recipients’ Fields

When you log in to your email account and start composing a new mail or click to reply to a mail you have received, you will find 3 separate fields for entering the email addresses of the recipients. The 3 fields are TO, CC and BCC and this applies to every email provider, be it your Gmail account or MS Outlook. In case you haven’t noticed it yet, here’s a screenshot of a MS Outlook account that shows the 3 fields we’ve been talking about!

So, yes you have 3 fields to enter the email addresses of the people you’re sending your email to. However, entering the email addresses randomly in the 3 fields is NOT what you should be doing. Why not, you may ask? Well, the information that follows will help us understand just that.

Using the TO Field:

The TO field is, according to the rules of email etiquette, meant for the main recipient(s) of your email. To be more precise, this field should be used to include the recipients who are required to take action in response to the email. These are the people whose names you include in the email salutation or the members of the group or team you’ve addressed your email to.

It’s important to note that there is no upper limit to the number of recipients you can include in the TO field. So, if there are 10 or even 20 people for whom the mail is directly relevant, you should include all of them in the TO field.

Using the CC Field:

CC stands for Carbon Copy. The CC field is used to refer to the concept of the carbon copy as it sends additional copies of a single email to one or more recipients.

The TO and CC fields are often used interchangeably because no matter which one you use, there is little difference in the way your recipients view the email. However, the general practice is to use the CC field to send a copy of the email to people just to keep them in the loop. Email etiquette says that the people you keep in the CC field are not expected to take any action or reply to the message.

In business emails, the CC field is often used to show the recipient that other important people are aware of the email and that the email requires urgent action and needs to be taken seriously.

Using the BCC Field:

BCC is for Blind Carbon Copy. It sends copies of the email to multiple recipients, the only difference being that none of the recipients are made aware of who else has received the email.

The BCC field is used when you want to send an email to multiple recipients but do not want any of them to know about the other people you have sent them to. There can be many scenarios where the BCC field might be used, and the purpose might be a desire to keep the names of the recipients a secret to one another and also protect the privacy of recipients.

The most common application is for sending an email to a long list of people who do not know each other, such as mailing lists. This protects the privacy of the recipients as they are not able to view each other’s email addresses.

The Final Word:

So, that was about the email recipient fields and when to use them. Before I sign off, here’s an interesting fact. Unlike the way it works with recipients in CC, none of the recipients in BCC receive the reply posted by any of the other recipients on the same email thread. In other words, the BCC recipients cannot be part of the future communications on the mail thread and if you want them to, you need to forward each mail to them separately.

Your Google Sheet for Mail Merge has a column titled "Email Address" and that column, as the name suggests, contains the list of recipients for that campaign. When you run merge against the sheet, it will send out one email per row in the spreadsheet.

Add Multiple Recipients​

If you would like to add more email recipients to your merge campaign, you can simply add more rows in the Google Sheet and each recipient would be sent a separate message.

You can also add multiple recipients in one email message so they all receive the same email message at the same time.

There are two ways to send an email to more than one person in mail merge.

1. Use the dynamic CC and BCC option and include the other recipients in the same message but in the CC/BCC fields.
2. Add multiple email addresses in the Email Address column, separated with commas. Each recipient will then be included in the To field of your outgoing email message.

Send to Group Emails​

You can send emails to Google Groups, mailing lists or any distribution lists through Mail Merge.

A list can have multiple members and yet, because a single email is sent to the group, it will only reduce your daily quota by one.

When sending to a group, the email cannot be personalized for each recipient and you'll also not be able to track which member of the Gmail group opened or clicked your email.

What do you put between email addresses?

How do you send an email to more than one person?

When sending an email to multiple people what line should you place the email address to prevent each recipient from seeing the other email addresses?