How to Automatically BCC an Email Address in Outlook

Evan Gower July 30, 2019

BCCing yourself is a very useful thing for following up on emails. If you prefer to have an email that you sent in your inbox, usually for the purposes of following up on them, adding your own email address as BCC is the right choice. However, people often overlook this when sending an important email, which leads to them forgetting to follow up. This can easily lead to problems down the line.

How to Automatically BCC an Email Address in Outlook

Fortunately, there is a way to automatically BCC yourself whenever you send an email, which is a surefire way of making sure that you follow up on every email. However, enabling automatic self-BCCing isn’t really straightforward. It involves creating a rule in Outlook.

Manage Rules & Alerts

Auto BCC and CC is a big thing in Outlook. While you’ll have to download a new add-on for your browser-based email account in order to achieve this, Microsoft Outlook allows you to create a rule. The rules feature is found under the Manage Rules & Alerts menu option in the upper middle part of the screen, in the Home tab, under the Rules icon.

Click Manage Rules & Alerts and you’ll see a new window that gives you the option to create a new rule. Click New Rule in the upper left corner of this window. You’ll see 3 categories: Stay Organized, Stay Up to Date, and Start from a blank rule. Select Apply rule on messages I send under the Start from a blank rule category.

Conditions

In the Rules Wizard window, you can choose what emails will get sent to you as BCCs. For instance, by checking with specific words in the subject options, you’re creating the auto BCC rule for emails with certain words that you mention.

As you’re the one who sends the email, you can use this clever option to automatically sort your emails. You could add the word “Follow-up” into the list of specific words and mark the emails that need following up with that word.

There are also many other interesting conditions that you can set for your emails. If you want all the mails that you send to be stored in your inbox as BCC, just click Next, without checking any of the listed boxes.

Exceptions

Exceptions are essentially the opposite of Conditions here. As you have probably guessed, this is where you outline situations in which you do not want to include yourself as BCC. You could follow the same example from above and use the except if the subject contains specific words option to add an exception. In this example, you might use the “non-follow-up” command, but this might create clutter and even an error, as the follow-up words are already a part of your conditions.

You’re perhaps better off with the except if sent to people or public group or the except if assigned to any category exceptions.

Actions

This is where you “program” the actions that this rule applies. That is to say, this is where you choose what happens to the emails that you’ve set conditions for. You want to make sure that an email sent by yourself ends up in your inbox, but, unfortunately, a direct BCC command automation doesn’t exist here. This doesn’t mean that you can’t mimic a BCC.

First of all, select Cc the message to people or public group in the Actions step of the Rules Wizard. Now, click people or public group and enter your email address. This is how you make sure that the email that you send that meets the set conditions will end up in your inbox. If you don’t want your email address to appear publicly in the emails you send, check the Move a copy to the specified folder option in the first step, click the Specified Folder link, and select your inbox.

outlook

BCC in Your Inbox

Tweaking your own mail to fit your needs will give you a huge advantage in your work. It will make sure that your inbox is finely sorted out and good organization is essential in any line of work. Of course, Outlook’s Rules Wizard has more use cases than just setting up an automatic BCC. However, carefully planning things out and making sure that the exceptions and conditions do not overlap and that they encompass the right types of email is essential.

Well-made auto BCC rules can help you a lot in sorting your inbox. However, if you do it poorly, you might flood your inbox, creating and an even bigger problem than the one you set out to solve.

Do you use automatic BCC in Outlook? How did you set it up? What exceptions and conditions do you use and what other rules did you create?