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I do not believe that sending emails using a Bcc will allow the individual recipients to see the email addresses of who else was Bcc’d. You can see all the addresses to who you Bcc’d by viewing the header of the email you sent, but to each of the recipients, it will appear as though the email was only sent to them. I do not believe that even if a recipient viewed the headers or clicked on “inspect element” of the email they received, that this would allow them to view the addresses of the other recipients. Not 100% sure however that someone who is very, very tech savvy with having access to some very advanced analytic tools couldn’t, but I doubt it that would be the case for most people.

It is not a good idea however to send an email to a large number of recipients using Bcc.

This is because some email providers limit the number of recipients you can send to in a single email to or the number of email recipients in a 24 hour period for a non-commercial email account (Gmail, yahoo, etc., even Comcast for non-commercial accounts) and they will lock the sender’s email account for exceeding those limits. His email account could also get flagged and locked out if there are a number of undeliverable emails (bad email addresses) that come back so you want to make sure that all the email addresses you have are correct, up to date and are entered correctly. He’d probably be OK with sending to 50 recipients in one email, one time but if he sends out follow-ups, it could be a problem.

But the bigger potential problem is that many email providers may see an incoming email with many Cc’d or Bcc’d recipients as being spam and filter it out, sending it to the recipients spam folder (and if he wants these emails to reach and be read, he doesn’t want them going into the recipient’s spam folder) or even worse, reporting the sender’s email domain name as being a spammer. And that could cause any and all future mails from that email domain name to be then blocked by many email providers and it’s no fun to get unblocked.

As others have suggested, MailChimp or AWeber might be an easy and affordable solution. I haven’t used either of those, but I did use Constant Contact when I was on the board of a NFP and sending out monthly newsletters and blast email updates to our over 200 active members and sponsors.

When we decided to try to save money on the printing and postage costs and send our newsletters along with blast email announcements out electronically, the first time I tried to send a mass blast email about an event cancellation, only to about 50 people and a simple text only email and using a Bcc and doing it from my personal Comcast email account, I quickly found out about the limits, I ended up having to break it up into 3 separate emails and even then got a nasty gram from Comcast about “spamming” and got my personal email account locked out for a short time until I was able to resolve the issue with Comcast and get my account unlocked.

The only thing I would say is that services like MailChimp, AWeber and Constant Contact are geared more toward sales and marketing and newsletter emails and so for a simple text only email, could be overkill in that you would have a lot of options to gussy up the emails with logos and graphics and such that you might not need or not want to avail yourself of.

But when I used Constant Contact, even in designing very professional looking newsletters with embedded links and graphics, jpegs, etc, it was surprisingly simple and easy to use and because we got NFP pricing, was very affordable over printing and snail mail costs. I could also track any undeliverable email addresses and easily remove them from future communications and “subscribers” could opt out of receiving future emails so that we didn’t run afoul of spamming.

Good luck with your project and let us know how it turns out.