Please add BCC field to the email & email templates

I also would like this option. I prepared a screenshot to make this very request, but it seems someone else has already requested it... screenshot is attached anyway so I won't feel like I wasted my time... Thanks, Daniel.

Can a WHMCS staff member pick up this request? I believe it should be very simple to add a BCC option, it's not really any more work than to copy/paste the "CC" code and add the letter "B" to it.

There is no requirement for the staff to pick up the request for it to generate popularity with the whmcs community. If there is popularity it will gain the attention needed by the staff in due course.

A feature request that takes practically no effort to implement, does not need popularity. Since there is already a feature to send CC's, adding BCC's basically doesn't require any effort.

You are correct, but its still a feature request and may not be very popular. Would you want every little feature to be added into the system just because one or two people want something to be added?

If you genuinely believe that this doesn't require popularity and that the developers will simply add it as soon as they see it. Maybe you should submit it directly via a support ticket where it can be passed onto the devs. This system is here to gauge demand for a feature and gain peer review/support If we all expect that our submission will simply be added because we believe it will, then what is the point in having this system in place? Time will bring this to its result.

When it involves a feature that makes sense, doesn't involve any downsides whatsoever and barely takes any time to implement: yeah.

It does have a down side, extra processing time to check whether a BCC has been filled.

For one email this is minuscule Multiply it by thousands and that's a whole load of checks going on for one field that may or may not be filled thus could well be wasted resource.

You also need to think from the system side not just the design side.

You don't need to check that. If BCC is left empty, it could still just include a BCC header line with no email address. So when the field has [email protected] in it, it would send an email with "BCC: [email protected]" and if the field is empty it sends "BCC: ". No additional checks required.

Moreover, even if it would run a check like that, even with thousands of emails, you're really talking about an absolutely miniscule overhead. But like I said, it doesn't even need to check that at all.

Please look at this from the perspective of a PHP coder, even those minuscule amounts can add up to very large sums in a very short amount of time.

Don't forget, if you add in a BCC to the email templates system that covers all email templates not just those that you choose to fill the field on.

You don't need to take my word for it. Knock up some scripts yourself and you can test it. 10000 iterations should be a fair benchmark to give you an idea of what your looking at.

Why are you getting in so much detail every time? Focus on the feature and let the developers worry about anything else.

To answer your argument. 10000 iterations is nothing. You can do a million in roughly 0.12s, if you set a variable during that time it will take you 0.15s. So even if you would send out a million e-mails in a single batch: the bottleneck isn't going to be PHP, it's going to be your SMTP server.

In this case, if you add a BCC field to inform a billing team of an overdue invoice, even the SMTP server would hardly be a bottleneck unless your company is that big that it needs to send out thousands of e-mails and in that case you probably have taken measures to ensure e-mail delivery anyway.

Now your focussing on the minor detail, the intention wasnt meant to be a definitive answer simply a point that nothing comes free of overhead, an over-head might i add that is then given to anybody who upgrades to that system and may never use it. Would you want to take resources away from things that really matter?

If it was so critical to me that i had a BCC on emails i would simply create a hook and add my own. But thats just me, I cant see the need to apply this to the system so everybody has to take a loss (no matter how small) but thats just my opinion.

I only went into more detail because it was your argument against the feature. I only explained that it isn't going to be causing the performance loss you said it could be.

You're completely dismissing the point of a feature request system in your last argument. Every new feature will have a potential impact on the system. In this case the overhead is negligible and there is no argument against it. If you feel that the potential overhead of a new feature is decisive enough to dismiss a feature then we can stop using the feature request system, leave the system as it is, and only make minor improvements. Everything else can be done by either an action hook or a module.

I'm sorry but your argument doesn't make any sense to me.

@CDJ HOSTING

Take a loss, come on man, you can't possibly be serious about this. As pointed out by getup, we are talking about completely insignificant overhead here. And if you really are *that* concerned about it, it would also be very simple to include a feature to simply leave BCC's disabled for the whole system. Having a feature doesn't mean it needs to be enabled without possibility to disable it (although, personally I really don't see a need to include the option to disable it for such insignificant overhead). Quite frankly, I feel like you're just dragging this on even though you know you're nitpicking here.

Please just stop sidetracking this feature request. All I was asking for us that WHMCS staff member takes a look at this request. There is no need for you to respond to that, they're perfectly capable of doing that themselves.

On a side note: I don't see how it would be possible to send BCC's with a hook when it comes to invoice reminders. If that is actually possible, I'd be happy to apply some custom coding, but I don't think this is possible. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

You would have to take a look at the documentation. There's a mergefields array, I have not looked into this properly, but if my thinking here is correct you could supply the bcc in this way.

With regard to my "nitpicking" give me a valid use case for it and change my mind.

The system already sends out the email to the required persons, Your client gets to choose who receives it from their contacts.

You can already from each template choose to send yourself (or any email address) copies of the email, so in what case would you need a third email sending out?

I dont feel i am, this should be used for features that would serve to benefit of the whole user base of whmcs, not just one or two who might find an extra feature useful.

As far as dismissing it. Actually im not at all, i dont feel it is beneficial but that doesnt mean you couldn't put forward a real case for it that might sway my view.

Saying a the loss is negligible isn't a good argument for adding a feature, if we add every feature because it own implementation is negligible then before we know it its no longer negligible think of the larger scope.

This is just one feature of thousands that have come and will come in the future. If it adds real value to the system then surely that is far more important.

I do feel that a BCC field would be a nice addition. Since there is already a CC, adding a BCC shouldn't be asking too much. In some cases, admins would like to be blindcopied in mails certain sent to clients. I for one would love to have this feature and wonder why it was never included in the first place (alongside the CC field)

Do you mean as well as your own email so another admin can receive the emails?

If thats the use case then i think the templates is the wrong place for it. That (isnt now i know) should be something selectable on the admin account settings. It would require some further configurations on the admin roles to decided what they could choose to receive per admin role.

The admin templates would not be the wrong place for it. If you can select per email template who should be CC'ed, it would only make sense to also be able to select who can be BCC'ed. The person who would be on BCC, would not necessarily need to be an admin. The ability to BCC someone on a final invoice overdue invoice email template would make perfect sense.

Again, please just stop thinking of reasons why this request may *not* be useful. It is useful to me and clearly also to several others.

It was not your use case i was responding to. please stop being so abusive.

That use case is applicable to me too - I even mentioned it in the original feature request.

I'm not being abusive, I'm just asking you to stop sidetracking my request. When it comes to adding BCC while a CC option is already available, it really is just not needed for you to make the same point over and over. You've stated your opinion, leave it at that.

CDJ: you started your argument that the potential drop in performance is a reason not to implement this feature. In fact, that was your only argument. I showed you that the drop in performance is negigible, unless you feel that a 0,15s overhead for 1 million e-mails is a real performance hit on your system (that 0,15s was to process them all by the way). After that you kept focussing on the amount of resources that an extra feature can cause and you used that as an argument to not see a feature implemented. That is dismissing the whole point of having a feature request system as the majority of features will alter the performance of a system in any shape or form. Some more than others.

I never said that we should implement every feature simply because the performance loss is negligible, don't put those words into my mouth because I didn't say, I only showed that your argument was invalid. That's all.

Either way, I like this feature and I can see actual use for it. You obviously don't and that's fine, but don't bring arguments to the table that don't matter.

1. function hook_email_bcc($vars){
2. switch ($vars['messagename']) {
3. case "Third Invoice Overdue Notice":
4. $merge_fields['BCC'] = "[email protected]";
5. break;
6. default:
7. break;
8. }
9. return $merge_fields;
10. }
11. add_hook("EmailPreSend",1,"hook_email_bcc");

I dont know for sure that this will work, but if you can supply a bcc in this way you dont need this feature. You need to look to how you can get that into the header. That is beyond my assistance here. Have a nice day.

Thank you for sharing that, I appreciate it. I'll give that a shot shortly when our developers aren't actively using our dev environment.

I would still say that even if this works, it would still be nice (and would make sense) to add this feature anyway, as it would simply be a lot more straight forward. As others have pointed out, if you have a CC field, it's actually a bit unusual that there's no BCC option.

At the moment, users don't get reminders for some other services that they use (asides invoice reminders), so we make use of Email Marketer which sends an email template to the client just before expiration. What we would like is to have a BCC for the respective templates without having to create hooks for each template, especially since a CC field already exists, as these mails are also sent to our billing department as the termination process of such services is currently manual.

If you however have a better solution asides using this feature for reminders for services, do share.

you dont have to create hooks for each template, if you look at my example it contains a switch, you can add in as many or as few cases as you wish to have.

The hook will do what you need, As in it will pick up the template name that is being used (the actual name of it you see on the admin side). This means that you can then do ass you please with the templates, within reason. The part of it i am unsure will work is feeding in the BCC in this way, but i dont see why it shouldnt be possible.

Side Note: If certain services do not get emails, there may not be a pre email hook point, I cannot be certain, If there isnt you would have to look at a way to trigger it.

You could be right, i have to concede my arguments against do not exactly stand up for much, I just dont see a practical need for it so any loss in my mind is a waste. thats my last work on the whole subject its gotten a little petty to be fair so im just going to drop it. Hopefully the solution i shared will help you out, Good luck.

Thanks for sharing this. I however tried it and it did not seem to work. I guess this emphasizes the need of such a feature as I so dearly need a BCC to email templates. If you can assist with making this hook work, I would be very grateful.

Thanks again

Hi again Toba

If you want to then feel free to get in touch with me here http://forum.whmcs.com/private.php?do=newpm&u=73427 (whmcs forum inboxes). I will be happy to discuss it further rather than continuing here as i dont think the two relate.

I agree with CDJHosting. Both are different things.

Regards,

Jane

http://www.highimpactemail.com/

This is not how the custom merge fields work. You can not add a CC or BCC like this. If you ever made it work I would be surprised to know that.

Hi

We would very much like to see a bcc line added

Usage case example:

We need to send an email to a unique email address @trustpilot so they can automatically send a review invitation to anyone who places an order the email we will use is the Order Confirmation email in WHMCS as it needs to send the order number along with some other bits

Trustpilot stipulate the following:

"is a unique email address for your company and is confidential.

The email address must never be placed in the CC: or the TO: fields when

you email your customers. It is private and confidential and must not

be seen by your customers."

Thanks

Paul

We would also like to see the BCC functionality added on a per email template, for integration with systems like trustpilot.

Hi,

Thanks for taking the time to make this suggestion. There is currently a "Copy To" field available when editing an email template and its behaviour is dictated by the Setup > General Settings > Mail tab > Mail Type setting. If SMTP is selected the recipient will be CC'd, if set to phpmail() they will be BCC'd instead.

Does that help achieve your goals here?