"CWLee" wrote in message
...

Assume an email is sent, showing person X in the TO field,
person Y in the CC field, and person Z in the BCC field. If
either person X or Y then sends a reply, using the "reply to
all" option, does Z receive a copy of that reply?

Thanks.

--
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CWLee
Former slayer of dragons; practice now limited to sacred
cows. Believing we should hire for quality, not quotas, and
promote for performance, not preferences.



When you use Reply-To, you are replying to the recipients that are
listed in the To or Cc headers. The To, Cc, and Bcc *fields* in your
e-mail client are just that: input fields. They are NOT used to
specify the recipient of your e-mails. Instead the RCPT-TO command
sent by your e-mail client to your mail server are used to specify the
recipients. If there are N recipients then your e-mail client sends N
RCPT-TO commands to your mail server followed by just one DATA command
which contains the content of your e-mail. The To, Cc, From, and
Subject headers in your outbound e-mail are part of the *data* for
your message and may not reflect accurately from whom the email was
sent or to who it was sent. What you put into the To, Cc, and Subject
fields gets put into the data of your message. Your e-mail client
compiles an aggregate list of recipients from the To, Cc, and Bcc
fields to generate its list of RCPT-TO commands. That means the
recipient(s) get your *data* which only includes the To and Cc fields.
The e-mail client should NOT include the Bcc field you used in its UI
as a header in the data you sent as your message; otherwise, the
e-mail client is broken, hacked, or coded to violate this standard
(but then the sending or receiving mail hosts may strip out the Bcc
header to ensure the recipient does not see it).

Since there is no Bcc header in the copy of your message that the
recipient got, you cannot reply to recipients for which you have no
information. Anyone listed in the Bcc *field* in your e-mail program
will not be listed in any header in the received copy of your message.
That is why it is called the BLIND Carbon Copy field: all recipients
are blind to whoever was included in the Bcc field.