Learning Zone

Hi John,

When you forward or reply to an email, the email program will generally display all previous senders and addressees at the top of the message.

In business correspondence, you may wish your recipients to know who has previously received a copy of the dialogue, and that’s why email works in this way.

However, it’s generally accepted that when forwarding jokes, etc, via email that you should remove the names and email addresses of previous recipients displayed at the top of the message, as failure to do so can lead to them falling into the hands of spammers, with all the inconvenience that it causes.

After you start the forwarding or reply process, you can highlight old email addresses using the mouse and delete them, so that they don’t appear in the email you forward to your friends.

If you are sending an email, you can conceal the recipients by using the BCC address box (it stands for “Blind Carbon Copy”). Unfortunately, it’s not always displayed by default. In Outlook Express, you can reveal it using View | All headers.

Any email addresses in the BCC box receive the email as normal but the addresses themselves are not shown in the email.