Properties to, cc and bcc

All addressees of an email are set in the to, cc and bcc fields of the MIME header. In the input JSON object, you can use the JSON properties with similar names to specify the addresses to which the email should be sent.

Because a single email can be sent to many different receivers, the responsive API is flexible in reading the input: the input JSON may contain a single receiver, but also long lists of receivers stored in arrays. The number of receivers in the input JSON is not limited.

to and cc headers

With the to and cc properties you specify the to and cc headers in the MIME message. This however does not necessarily mean that the mail is going to be sent to these addresses as well. The email protocol allows you to include a to and cc header in your mail, but send the message to a completely different address (although this is not considered to be a good practice).

This also is possible with the responsive API: the addresses that you set in the to and cc fields do not have to match the addresses to which you will eventually send the email.

The bcc header

The bcc field is supposed to be a hidden field. When you send an email, it will be stripped out of the mail so that the receiver does not know to whom the mail was blind-carbon-copied. If you use the API to only generate a responsive email, we will generate a MIME message that still has all the bcc headers, and it is up to you or up to your mail server to strip the bcc headers before the mail reaches the receiver.

If you use the responsive API not only to generate emails, but also to send them, we take care of stripping the bcc address. In such situations it is not needed to set the bcc property, as it will automitically be stripped from the mail before it is sent.

The to, cc and bcc properties can all be set to different types of values. You can directly assign a string value containing an email address, or a JSON object with a name and address property. If you want to include more than one addresses, you can also use array values.

{
    "name": "My template",
    "from": "info@example.com",
    "to" : "info@example.org",
    "cc" : {
        "name" : "John Doe",
        "address" : "johndoe@example.org"
    },
    "bcc" : [
        "secret@example.org",
        {
            "name" : "Hidden Name",
            "address" : "secret2@example.org"
        }
    ],
    "subject": "I am an example subject",
    "background": {
        "color": "#f3f3f3"
    },
    "content": {
        "blocks": [
            {
                "type": "text",
                "content": "This is text is an example"
            }, 
            {
                "type": "image",
                "src": "http://www.example.com/examplary.gif"
            }
        ]
    }
}

The above example shows the different ways how you can set the to, cc and bcc properties: as string value, as object value or as an array. The array in turn may contain string values as well as objects. The ResponsiveEmail API will recognize the input format that you specify.

Related information

The destination addresses are stored in the header of the email. Other top level properties to change the mime header of the generated mime are for example the destination addresses are stored in the header of the email. Other top level properties to change the mime header of the generated mime are for example subject, from, replyTo and the property headers.