We often see them in our emails and yet, few people really know how to use the “cc” and “bcc” functions. These can be extremely useful, or cause disaster…
Since its creation in 1965, e-mail has taken an increasingly important place in our society, so much so that it is difficult to do without it these days. It is first of all a way to communicate with your loved ones, but also to exchange important professional information, all with a multitude of possibilities in terms of attachments, from photos to more or less confidential documents.
These small (and sometimes long) digital letters are everywhere around us and are even essential for certain professions. And to help you, different email services like Outlook or Gmail have many options to make your life easier and fully control your emails. They allow the automatic sorting of exchanges, the exclusion of unwanted emails, the search for an old conversation… Messaging solutions are constantly improving them and regularly adding new features, such as very soon the addition of an AI to help you better manage your emails.
There are also ancestral functions, still available and yet little known regarding emails. This is particularly the case for the cc and bcc functions. You have certainly already seen these two little mentions under the address bar of your mailbox. Very practical options and yet little used, sometimes even poorly understood by users.
The term “cc” comes from the English “carbon copy” to designate the copy of a message. By using this feature within your emails, you will be able to add one or more users to your discussion. This is particularly useful when you want to interact with different people and they need to be able to interact with each other. This can also be useful for adding one of your colleagues to an email loop so that they have access to it.
The “bcc” function (coming from the term “blind carbon copy”) has a fairly similar function. Using it, you can add different users to an email loop and allow them to react to it. The difference with “cc” is that by using “bcc”, you are not informing users that more than one of them has received your email. You do not let everyone know who else received your email, nor do you reveal the email addresses of other recipients. If one of the recipients of a “bcc” email clicks on “reply all”, they will only respond to the sender of the message.
Both of these functions prove very useful in very specific cases, but can hardly be confused. The cc function allows e-mails and attached documents to be exchanged openly and publicly with a series of interlocutors. It allows everyone to know the members of the group and their email addresses and therefore to communicate with them in the “loop”, that is to say in the same conversation, or to send them a new message separately.
If one of your interlocutors does not want us to know that he is receiving this email or even refuses to have his address communicated to others, using the cc function will however be banned and you should prefer cc instead. Under penalty of big trouble sometimes in the event of confusion. There are countless email addresses accidentally revealed in the professional world in this way.