What does CC mean in emails? To, CC, and BCC explained

CC (carbon copy) and BCC (blind carbon copy) are standard email features that control who receives a message and what information they can see.

Understanding the difference between To, CC, and BCC is crucial in a business context. CC the wrong person and your client sees an internal aside they shouldn’t have. Forget to CC a decision-maker and they never see an email thread they really needed to.

Keep reading to find out which option to select to communicate clearly (to the right recipient/s), avoid unnecessary replies, protect recipients’ email addresses, and safeguard sensitive information.

What does CC mean?

CC stands for Carbon Copy, a throwback to a time when physical, handwritten memos or letters would be replicated using a sheet of carbon paper(ventana nueva).

CC allows you to send a copy of an email to multiple recipients who are not the primary recipient in the To field. The primary recipient will see the email address(es) you have entered into the CC field, and any responses from them. Likewise, the person you have CCd will see any responses from the recipient (unless they’re removed from the CC field, or the recipient clicks Reply instead of Reply all).

CC’ing is especially useful when sending business emails, because you can add as many recipients into an email as you like, all of whom will receive a copy of the same email and see each other’s addresses and responses. This keeps everyone in the loop and creates a transparent record of the conversation without requiring a response.

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When to use CC in email

CC is a useful function when you need someone (or multiple people) other than the recipient to know about and follow an email thread.

For example, when you want to loop in an entire project team on something that affects everyone’s work, such as a scope or deadline change, you can simply CC them in.

CC’ing can also be helpful when you want particular individuals to have visibility of an email thread without requiring their input. When emailing a client proposal, for example, you might want to CC anyone directly involved in the project so they have visibility of their feedback and your subsequent discussion. If anything gets escalated or referenced in a review later, they’re always informed on time.

When not to use CC in email

CC’ing should be avoided when your email (or the subsequent email thread) contains sensitive or confidential information. When you email one person sensitive information, there’s a risk they could forward or store it, but CCing increases that risk by adding more recipients, often including people who weren’t the intended audience for the content in the first place.

You should also avoid using CC when you expect someone you’re CC’ing to take action. People included in CC often assume they don’t need to respond, which can lead to missed tasks or delays. This risk grows when you CC large numbers of recipients unnecessarily, which also clutters inboxes with irrelevant noise.

CC’ing an entire distribution list on a routine status update creates noise without adding accountability. Emailing your entire team about a change that doesn’t affect them can create confusion.

You should also be careful about CC’ing someone into an existing conversation without the other party’s knowledge or agreement — like, for example, adding a new stakeholder to a client thread without telling the client first. Even if you have a legitimate reason, it can look like you’re widening access to a conversation that may be confidential.

What does BCC mean?

BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy. It works like CC’ing, without the visibility. The BCC function allows you to send copies of the same email to multiple people without revealing that they are part of a mass email, or revealing the other recipients’ email addresses or responses to your original email.

Another key difference: If you enter multiple contacts into the BCC field, when they respond it is only you who will receive their response email. It will not be received by any other BCC recipients.

When to use BCC in email

BCC should be used whenever you need to send multiple people the same email, but you do not want them to know they are a part of a mass email or to be able to see the email addresses of the other recipients.

BCC’ing is useful for protecting the privacy of people who have given you their email address with the expectation that you will not share it without their permission. For example, when sending an update about your company to a mailing list, you should use the BCC function to ensure the individual recipients cannot see the addresses of everyone else who has signed up for that mailing list.

You can also BCC yourself when sending an email from a shared or generic team inbox, to keep a personal record of correspondence sent on your team’s behalf.

When not to use BCC in email

As with CC’ing, be wary of BCC’ing when your email contains sensitive information, or you suspect that the email thread resulting from your email will contain sensitive information.

Avoid using BCC in situations where transparency matters. Covertly adding someone to the conversation can damage trust if it surfaces and be considered a breach of email etiquette. It’s better to CC them openly or send a separate note.

BCC should not be used for ongoing conversations, such as an active back-and-forth negotiation or client conversation — where you expect whoever you’ve BCC’d in to be able to follow the whole conversation. Since BCC recipients are excluded from replies, this means cutting them out of exactly the conversation you wanted them to follow.

What’s the difference between To, CC, and BCC?

Feature	To	CC	BCC
Role	The intended main contact of the email.	For people who need to stay in the loop.	To include people without others knowing.
Visibility	Visible to everyone.	Visible to everyone.	Hidden from all other recipients.
Recipient Awareness	Everyone knows they are the main contact.	Everyone knows who else is being kept informed.	Only you and the BCC’d person know they are there.
Reply All Behavior	Receives all replies.	Receives all replies.	Excluded from future “Reply All” threads.
Expectation	Response expected.	For your information (FYI) only.	Should not participate in the thread.
Best For	Direct requests, tasks, and 1:1s.	Transparency and team collaboration.	Mass emails, privacy, and discreet oversight.

What happens when you hit reply or reply all?

Reply behavior can be confusing, especially when multiple recipients are involved. What happens depends on whether you choose Reply or Reply all.

Hitting Reply all when you intended to hit Reply can lead to internal asides and information leaking to clients, or to an entire distribution list being emailed by mistake. One wrong click can stifle your team’s productivity and even threaten your company’s reputation.

If you are in the To or CC field:

• Clicking Reply sends your response only to the sender.
• Clicking Reply all sends your response to everyone in the To and CC fields.

If you are in the BCC field:

• Clicking Reply sends your response only to the sender.
• Clicking Reply all sends your response to everyone in the To and CC fields, not to other BCC recipients — but you will reveal to them that you were BCC’d

A better way to send group emails

Although using the CC and BCC functions is the main way to send an email to multiple people, our encrypted email service Proton Mail also lets you do this by putting multiple recipients in a contact group.

Contact groups are useful for emailing multiple people who all know each other, especially if you regularly email them as a group. For example, a team sending weekly updates to stakeholders can save time by using a contact group instead of adding recipients manually every time.

Once you’ve created a contact group in your Proton Mail account, you can email everyone in that group at once by typing the name of the contact group into the To field and selecting the contact group you want to mass-email from the autofill menu. This will enter all of the email addresses of the contacts in that group to the To field.

When you email people who are in a contact group with each other, they can all see each other’s email addresses, although they will not know that you have put them in a contact group, and the name of that group won’t appear in their inboxes. If you don’t want the contacts in your contact group to know the other members’ addresses, you can enter the contact group into the BCC field instead.

Key takeaways on using CC and BCC in a professional setting

• To: is for the people expected to take action.
• CC (Carbon Copy): is for keeping people informed (FYI).
• BCC (Blind Carbon Copy): is for privacy (recipients are hidden from everyone else).

How Proton Mail protects To, CC and BCC email messages

Contact groups make CC and BCC quicker to use, but they don’t make them any safer from interception by a third party. That’s a different problem, and it’s one Proton Mail’s encryption can help with.

Proton Mail encrypts messages sent between Proton accounts with end-to-end encryption, and protects everything stored in your mailbox with zero-access encryption, meaning even Proton can’t read it — or decrypt it, even under compulsion from law enforcement. You can also add password protection to emails sent to non-Proton addresses, so they’re encrypted too.

None of this stops an email reaching the wrong person through a misplaced CC or BCC, and it doesn’t change who can see whose address in a CC or BCC field. That’s still down to you using the fields correctly. What encryption does protect is the content of a CC’d or BCC’d business email in transit, so a client proposal or an internal aside can’t be intercepted by a third party.

If your business regularly sends CC’d and BCC’d correspondence containing sensitive content like client proposals and internal decisions, Proton’s business email service applies that protection automatically, without your team having to think about it.

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