E-Mail “Tricks”

In response to my recent column on Forwarding E-mail messages, one respondent asked me to again publish the tip on how to get to and use the bcc: address field. That is the field that hides the list of people to whom you forward your e-mails. I’m happy to do that, but I’ll also give you another tip that most of us can use to assist in reading e-mail messages.
These tips will work for any IBM-type PC with Microsoft Windows installed in any version. They will probably work on Apple Computers, too, but I do not use Apple and never have, so I’m not sure how the processes differ. I tell you so you know and can make adjustments if you own an Apple product.
The heading, Bcc:, stands for Blind carbon copy, a rather outdated term referring to when we used to use that nasty carbon paper to make copies of documents. Even so, the term is a god one, because it relates to copying in others on your message without having to retype and resend it.
Every e-mail program I’ve used has only two address fields up at the top: To: and Cc:. Many people use those two a lot, usually putting the main addressee in the To: field and any secondary addressees in the Cc: field.
The quick way to get those addresses into their respective fields is to right click on the To: heading, which brings up a window with your address book in it, and then you select the names/addresses from there to insert them into the To: or Cc: field. So far, so good…
When you right click on the To: heading the window that appears also has the third field, Bcc:, which was not in the message heading. However, once you add a name/address to it, it will now appear in your message.
Using the Bcc: field for all addresses prohibits any of your addressees seeing who else you sent the message to, and it also prevents them from ever getting access to those addresses. They will never appear in the body of future message forwards or replies. The privacy of your family and friends is guarded when you use the Bcc: field.
There is only one more thing to learn on this topic. I already put it up above, but I’ll repeat it for emphasis. You do not have to put any address in either the To: or the Cc: field in order to use the Bcc: field. Every address is protected when you use only the Bcc: field, so try to always use only that one for any message that you send to two or more people, unless everyone is known to each other and needs to have the list of recipients.
Okay, now on to the other tip… If you have trouble reading fine print in messages, or maybe you want to see more detail in a picture or graphic, there is an easy way to enlarge it. Depress and hold down that little key at the bottom left side of your keyboard labeled ctrl. Now, use the scroll wheel on your mouse and roll it forward. Watch what happens on your screen.
You can do this on any document, e-mail message, picture, web page, in short, anything on your computer screen can be enlarged by those two easy actions.
Have fun playing with these two tips.