Can I set up my email so that I can send BCC emails en masse?

 Q I have to send regular messages to some 350 email addresses. These are located in various areas of the country and are stored in groups of 12 to 50 in my address book. The emails are using the blind carbon copy (BCC) field to avoid revealing the email addresses to the other recipients.

Is there any way of sending these addresses to the BCC field by default, as it is rather tedious having to move them from the To field each time. I use both Outlook and Gmail, so a solution for either one will do.
John Morrison

A There are various ways to achieve this in both Outlook and Gmail. However, the methods for Outlook generally rely on commercial add-ins, so we will concentrate on a free technique for Gmail.

If you are interested in achieving the same in Outlook, though, visit Microsoft’s Download Marketplace and explore the ‘Mail, e-mail and fax’ category – the Always BCC add-in should do the job for you, for example.

To use this procedure to enable automatic blind carbon copying in Gmail, you will need to use the Firefox web browser. If you don’t have this installed already, it can be downloaded free.

Then, you will need to download and install Greasemonkey: this is a free add-on for Firefox that can be used to customise the way websites look and function, with the help of user-written ‘scripts’ – little bits of computer code. Just click the Download link at the top of the page followed by the green Add to Firefox button then follow the prompts.

Now it’s time to find a Greasemonkey script that will make Gmail behave in exactly the way you want. Visit the usercript website and search for ‘BCC’. One that seems to do what you want is Gmail Auto BCC, though we found several more that work in a variety of different ways. To try one out, just click the green Install button on the script’s summary page.