Why are emails bcc'd, and what is a better solution for managing bcc'd emails for legal reasons?

Key findings

• Privacy: BCC ensures recipient privacy by hiding their email addresses from others on the same message, which is vital for mass communications. This practice helps to comply with various privacy regulations, such as GDPR.
• Compliance: Businesses often use BCC for legal and internal compliance purposes, archiving copies of all sent communications. This can be particularly prevalent in B2B contexts where specific communications, like those including executive contact details, must be retained.
• Deliverability Risks: An overlooked risk of using BCC for archiving is the potential for the archive inbox to reach its storage limit, leading to soft bounces. These bounces negatively impact overall email deliverability and sender reputation.
• Scalability Challenges: Relying on a standard email inbox for high-volume legal archiving is not a scalable or reliable solution, often leading to storage capacity issues and manual intervention.

Key considerations

• Alternative Archiving Solutions: Instead of BCC, consider dedicated archiving systems or email service providers (ESPs) that offer robust logging and storage capabilities for compliance, ensuring that all communications are securely and scalably recorded.
• Impact on Reputation: Consistent soft bounces due to a full BCC archive inbox can negatively affect your sender reputation, making it harder for legitimate emails to reach the inbox. Understanding why your emails go to spam is key.
• Technical Setup: For internal archiving, setting up a dedicated, managed machine or domain (e.g., bcc.yourdomain.com) with restricted access for incoming mail can prevent public exposure and mitigate issues seen with generic email providers like Gmail. This approach can be more reliable than using a standard email inbox for archiving.
• IT Collaboration: Effective management of legal archiving requires close collaboration with IT departments to implement scalable and secure solutions that avoid deliverability pitfalls associated with traditional BCC methods. For more information on BCC functionality, see WiseStamp's guide on how BCC works.

Key opinions

• Privacy First: Marketers use BCC to hide recipient email addresses from each other, which is essential for preserving privacy in large email campaigns or newsletters.
• Compliance Driver: BCC is often adopted for legal compliance, particularly in B2B environments, to archive all communications, even if they contain sensitive information like executive contact details. This is often seen as a 'cover your assets' measure.
• Unexpected Consequences: A common problem is that BCC'd archive inboxes can reach storage limits, causing emails to bounce, which impacts overall email deliverability. This highlights that BCC isn't a silver bullet for archiving.
• Industry Nuances: While BCC for legal reasons is prevalent in B2B, its application and necessity can differ significantly in B2C contexts. Marketing teams might not fully understand the technical and deliverability implications of this practice.

Key considerations

• Deliverability Impact: Marketers must be aware that using BCC, especially for high-volume internal archiving, can lead to bounce issues, which can subsequently harm sender reputation and inbox placement for all campaigns.
• Scalable Archiving: Marketers should advocate for dedicated, scalable archiving solutions instead of relying on BCC to a standard inbox. This ensures legal compliance without compromising sending infrastructure.
• Privacy vs. Efficiency: While BCC is good for recipient privacy, its use for internal archiving introduces inefficiencies and potential deliverability problems. Marketers need to balance these factors. Salesforce highlights how BCC can be used correctly for privacy.
• Collaboration with IT: Marketers should collaborate with their IT departments to implement robust, automated archiving systems that meet compliance requirements without creating deliverability headaches.

Key opinions

• Underestimated Problem: The issue of a BCC'd archive inbox causing bounces is an uncommon but significant deliverability problem that many experts might not immediately consider.
• Common Misuse: Experts observe situations where large organizations inappropriately BCC high volumes of emails to generic inboxes, like Gmail, for archiving purposes, leading to inevitable problems.
• Need for Dedicated Solutions: A key opinion is that dedicated, internal infrastructure is superior to third-party hosting for managing legal archiving of emails. This ensures better control and prevents unforeseen issues.
• Security Concerns: Operating an open SMTP server for archiving is a major security risk, attracting malicious traffic. Experts strongly recommend restricting incoming mail to only trusted outgoing IPs.

Key considerations

• Infrastructure Investment: Organizations should invest in or establish their own dedicated email archiving infrastructure, such as a specific domain like archive.yourdomain.com, to manage legal copies of emails. This provides a more robust and secure solution than standard BCC.
• IP Restriction: It is critical to configure email servers to only accept connections from your own verified outgoing IPs to prevent unwanted traffic and potential blocklisting issues.
• Deliverability Health: While BCC might seem like a simple solution, experts warn it can negatively impact your sender reputation and overall deliverability if not managed properly, leading to emails landing in spam. For more insights on email etiquette, Microsoft provides useful guidelines, including on BCC usage: What is BCC etiquette.
• Automated Archiving: Companies struggling with automated archive solutions from their vendors should consider implementing the expert-recommended in-house dedicated server approach for greater control and reliability.

Key findings

• Definition: BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy, signifying that recipients in this field are hidden from other recipients of the same email. This is its fundamental purpose.
• Privacy Compliance: Documentation often highlights BCC's role in helping organizations comply with privacy regulations by ensuring that personal email addresses are not exposed to unintended parties.
• Confidentiality Tool: BCC is presented as a tool for judiciously managing communications and safeguarding recipient confidentiality, particularly in group emails where members should not see each other's addresses.
• Limited Archiving Scope: While some mention BCC for internal documentation, technical and compliance documentation does not typically endorse it as a primary, scalable solution for legal archiving due to its inherent limitations and potential for error.

Key considerations

• RFC Standards: The fundamental behavior of BCC, where recipient addresses are removed from the message header before sending, is defined in email standards like RFCs, confirming its privacy-focused design. Understanding RFC 5322 can be helpful.
• Beyond Basic Email Clients: For advanced legal or bulk email practices, documentation implies that solutions beyond simple email client functions (like BCC) are necessary. This includes dedicated platforms with features for email authentication and logging.
• Avoiding Risks: Documentation indirectly warns against potential issues by outlining the intended use of BCC, which does not include large-scale, automated archiving that could lead to deliverability problems. Further guidance is available in Mailchimp's guide on BCC.