Carbon Copy And Blind Carbon Copy

The arrival of the word processor removed the need for carbon paper and, like correction fluid, demand for it plummeted to almost nil. But although the physical version may have all but disappeared, the carbon copy lives on in electronic form within Microsoft Outllook.

Carbon paper was invented in 1806 by Ralph Wedgewood of London, who soaked thin sheets in ink made from the pigment carbon black, and then dried them in blotting paper. His inspiration was not to make the lives of typists easier; the invention of the typewriter was still many decades away, rather he was trying to develop a machine that allowed the blind to write (and, curiously, it was Alexander Graham Bell's experiments in phonetics to aid the deaf that led to the invention of the telephone). Wedgewood was long dead before the mass production of typewriters saw his invention become an essential part of the stationery cupboard in almost every office.

The arrival of the word processor removed the need for carbon paper and, like the correction fluid in another of my articles this month, demand for it plummeted to almost nil. But although the physical version may have all but disappeared, the carbon copy lives on in electronic form within Microsoft Outllook.

If you want to send the same email to more than one person, the carbon copy (Cc:) and blind carbon copy (Bcc:) fields in Outlook allow the writer to create mails that are a carbon copy of the original, just like a typewritten one.

Below the field in which you type the recipient's address (To:) you will see the Cc: field. After you have typed your original mail and inserted the address of the intended recipient into the To: field, you can then send carbon copies to others by entering their addresses in the Cc: field, separating each one with a comma. Sending a mail via this means saves a lot of time, but it does have its drawbacks.

Mails sent via Cc: display the email addresses of all the recipients on screen. This may be all right in small groups where you want the recipients to know exactly who was copied in on the mail, but it can be a nightmare when a lot of people have received the same mail. For example, if a mailing list of 700 members were each sent information about a forthcoming gig, then the list of email addresses would take up far more space than the mail itself. Then there is the privacy issue - would you like your email address sent to 700 strangers? No? Step forward Blind Carbon Copy.

To open the Bcc: field, create a new message and go to View/Bcc Field. This can then be filled in the same way as the Cc: one, but the difference this time is that none of the email addresses of the recipients will be displayed in the copies. The address of the original recipient will be the only one displayed, so if you require complete anonymity for your recipients just send the original mail to yourself and yours will be the only address that is visible.

The Bcc field is a useful tool that allows the anonymity of recipients to be maintained, but there are certain rules of 'netiquette' that question the sending of multiple mails and not telling the recipients who else has received that mail. If this is an issue then the names of the other recipients may be placed at the foot of the mail so everyone knows who was copied in, but no email addresses have been displayed.

So sending multiple copies of the same mail can be done at a stroke with carbon copies. This is some advancement when you consider that the old original carbon paper could only make one copy of the original letter and that was seen as a major labour-saving device back then.

What would they have made of AutoComplete?