BCC Help

[skialta]

I have an Exchange 2003 SP2 system and whenever someone is BCC'ed on a message, they do not receive the Reply All messages, only the original message that they were BCC'ed on. I have message journaling installed for my GFI Mail Archiver so I know people have been replying to all, but anyone who was BCC'ed does not receive the new replies. Thoughts?

 

[ShackDaddy]

This is by design. When you put people in the BCC, they are not listed anywhere in the headers of the mail that goes out. Because of that, a reply-all cannot reach them. If you want people to be included in an ongoing thread, they can't be in BCC. There's no way around this except for removing them from BCC. This behavior is not unique to Exchange mail. It's part of the way SMTP email has been built.

ShackDaddy

 

[skialta]

My understanding was that as long as the mail was not going outside of the Exchange org then people would continue to be included if they were in the BCC field. These email threads are strickly internal.

 

[ShackDaddy]

See RFC 2822, which lays out the standards for email.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc822.html

When it describes the BCC field, it states the following:

This field contains the identity of additional recipients of
the message. The contents of this field are not included in
copies of the message sent to the primary and secondary reci-
pients. Some systems may choose to include the text of the
"Bcc" field only in the author(s)'s copy, while others may
also include it in the text sent to all those indicated in the
"Bcc" list.


For security reasons, Microsoft chose the first implementation. In any case, the non-BCC'd people would never have the information they needed to reply-all to the BCC'd people.

The server only uses the header information, it doesn't keep a separate store to track BCC information for the purpose that you are describing.

Each email on Exchange is a discrete, dissectable entity. If I save an email and choose to save the headers, it doesn't matter whether it was internal or external, I have the information related to it. Because of the nature of BCC communications, it's against the standard to attach the BCC list in any way to the email, even as a hidden header.

ShackDaddy