Undisclosed Recipient (Outlook 97)

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Hi!!
I found two threads on this subject but still some things don’t fit.

Sometimes I receive messages with Undisclosed Recipient in the TO: field. But when you check its properties, you find out no e-mail addresses are unfold.

Quite recently, a friend of mine sent one to me which showed something like:
TO: Undisclosed-Recipient:;@servername.com [servername is the name of the server of the business he works for]
I asked him and told me that I should send msgs with BCC, and thus the recipient would receive a mail containing the so-longed U-R stuff. But everytime I send a BCC msg, AFAIK, recipients receive blank TO: and CC: fields. I’ve tested it with my oh so many e-mail accounts.
So… what is it that triggers the trick!!?? I humbly believe it might be that when sending BCC msgs, some servers will send the recipient field as a TO: U-R, and some will not (maybe the former do not support BCC as a separate field, I dunno – I’m no IT xpert after all )

One last thing: in the other threads some claimed that one could force the U-R stuff by creating a group named Undisclosed-Recipient, and then send mails using this group in the TO: field. But there IS some difference, since by doing this (at least in outlook) all the recipients’ mail addresses are revealed, as opposed to the U-R line I told you about.

This Undisclosed Recipient thing is wasting me away. It seems of no real use, since BCCing recipients does the job. Yet, it’s fundamental for the gotta-know-it-all dude who won’t get an eye shut if he can’t get the answer to such challenging puzzles- Hey, that’s me!!

If anyone knows sumn’ else ’bout this, I’ll bring the champaign

Thank you in advance for your help

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I just did a test, creating an empty ‘Undisclosed Recipients’ group, putting this group in the To: field and then the real recipient addresses in the BCC: field. All messages were received with the sending address in the TO: field, with the actual address the message received into not being in the header at all.

From my experience, every message that I have ever received that had “Undisclosed” anywhere in the header has been from a spammer, so my rules generally delete such messages straight away. My thought is that the ‘Undisclosed’ messages you are referring to, and trying to mimic, are created by spam-churning programs.

If you want to send messages while keeping the email addresses confidential, BCC: is the simplest and easiest… and is less likely to be insta-flagged as spam.

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Dave,

I’ve also been hit by lotsa spam with U-R in the TO: field. But I’ve also received mails with U-R in the TO: field from at least two friends of mine (that I remember). So maybe spammers do use some kind of Undisclosed Recipient generating software, but this is not the only way. My friend told me I had to send BCC recipients to get the Undisclosed-Recipient line. So he did it unintentionally. That’s why I believe it has to do with compatibility between mail clients and servers, and between servers. There must be something in the way they communicate that creates this.

I agree that people should get used to BCCing recipients. I tend to do this unless I intend recipients to ‘see’ each other so they can interact. A world campaign against spammers won’t eradicate them for sure, but will at least make their lives less pleasant .

Back to the Undisclosed-Recipients stuff… any other thoughts?
Thanks

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