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For a crucial business event, I needed to send calendar invites to more than 75 people. Seems easy and straightforward, right? But the real catch was that I had to make sure that the members’ list was not exposed to anyone. It’s simple in the case of sending emails with the BCC option, but there’s no BCC for invites. I was unable to find a solid solution on which I can completely rely.
Understanding BCC in Outlook Calendar Invites
With the BCC, or Blank Carbon Copy option, you can invite multiple participants discreetly to a calendar meeting without disclosing email addresses to each other in the meeting. Here is why you might want to BCC Outlook calendar invite:
- Helps to validate data protection and maintain data privacy in place by hiding the email addresses of each participant.
- Allows for keeping unwanted attention of the members by hiding the details of VIP clients or government officials attending the event.
- Not using BCC will expose the participants’ details and often goes against the data protection policies.
- Hiding other members’ details from the invites helps in creating a cleaner and more readable calendar invite.
- People often use the reply all feature accidentally, which can spam the inboxes of other members. It makes sure that only the intended user receives the invite.
Top Methods: How to BCC in Outlook Meeting Invite?
You can use the following methods to BCC Outlook invites:
Method 1: For Outlook Web App or New Outlook
If you are working with the New Outlook or Outlook on the Web, here are the steps you can follow to hide your participant details in a calendar invite:
- Go to Outlook on the web and then click Calendar.
- Tap on New Event and then click on Browser
- From the options, select Hide attendee list.
- At last, click Send to direct invites to the recipients.
Note: For New Outlook, open New Outlook for Windows and select Calendar.
Method 2: Add Participants as Resources In Outlook Classic
In this method for BCC Outlook calendar invite, you will need to add the group members as the Resources so that others cannot see the recipients list:
- Open Outlook Classic and go to Calendar.
- Create a New Meeting > select Scheduling Assistant > Add Attendees.
- Now, paste the email addresses under Resources, separating them by semi colon.
- Verify that you didn’t list participants as Location. However, if accidentally pasted, delete them.
- Click Send to finish the BCC meeting invite in Outlook.
After BCC in Outlook Calendar Invites, Backup Your Outlook Calendar Entries
Calendar invites store crucial meetings and appointments that you can’t miss. Lost calendar entries mean there’s no way to track these schedules, eventually causing a loss in business efficiency. To secure your calendar entries, easily backup Outlook calendar entries using an advanced Kernel Office 365 Backup and Restore tool. The tool is designed to allow all users backup Office 365 data without hassles using the intuitive interface.
It allows you to export contacts and calendar entries to .vcf or .ics files, maintaining compliance with Global Data Protection standards. Moreover, the Office 365 backup tool also helps in downloading the entire Office 365 mailbox backup to avoid losing crucial mailbox data.
Follow the given steps to backup calendar using the tool:
- Launch the tool and click on the Backup tab, then click Add.
- Select authentication, provide required credentials, and select the desired mailboxes.
- Click Set Filter and Migrate to proceed further.
- After enumeration, apply Item type filter to select only Calendar items, and start backup.
- At the end, the software will start backing up data, showing live progress.
This way, you can easily backup Outlook calendar and also save the backup report in CSV using the software.
Conclusion
The methods explained in the above sections will provide you with the answer to the commonly asked question, “Can you BCC on an Outlook Calendar Invite?” It simply hides the participants of an Outlook calendar meeting from each other. This works the same way you add email addresses in the BCC section of the Outlook emails. Besides that, it is important to know that taking a thorough backup of the Outlook calendar is crucial before you actually start the process. Doing this will keep a copy of your calendar within your local storage.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, when you put email addresses in BCC, they can only see the email, the sender, and the recipient (themselves). No one from the attendees except those in the To or CC field can see that there are members BCC’d in the email.
You can use BCC whenever sending bulk email messages or calendar invites. This helps to keep the other user’s identity safe. This will also avoid spamming everyone’s email when someone from the attendees accidentally hit Reply All button.
