The Difference Between CC And BCC When Sending Out E-mails What’s the Difference Between CC and BCC When Sending an Email? 1. CC and BCC fields when sending email work similarly. CC stands for “carbon copy,” while BCC stands for “blind carbon copy. 2. CC vs BCC : When you CC people on an email, the CC list is visible to all other recipients. For example, if you CC shola@example.com and emeka@example.com on an email, shola will know that emeka also received the email, while emeka will know that shola also received the email. BCC stands for “blind carbon copy.” Unlike with CC, no one can see the list of recipients on the BCC list. For example, if you have seun@example.com and james@example.com in the BCC list, Seun won’t know that James received the email, and James won’t know that Seun received the email. NB 1: Someone on the BCC list can see everything else, including the CC list and the contents of the email. However, the BCC list is secret – no one can see this list. (If a person is on the BCC list, they’ll see only their own email on the BCC list. NB 2: BCC doesn’t function like CC when it comes to email threads. For example, if you send an email to bola@example.com and BCC james@example.com, James will receive the original email you sent. However, if Bola replies, James won’t get a copy of Bola’s reply – Bola’s email program can’t see that James ever received the email, so it doesn’t send him a copy of the reply. 3. When to Use CC and BCC (CONCLUSION) CC is useful when: You want someone else to receive a copy of an email, but they aren’t one of the primary recipients. BCC is useful when: You want someone else to receive an email, but you don’t want the primary recipients of the email to see you’ve sent this other person a copy. For example, if you’re having a problem with a fellow employee, you might send them an email about it and BCC the human resources department. HR would receive a copy for their records, but your fellow employee wouldn’t be aware of this. You want to send a copy of an email to a large amount of people. For example, if you have a mailing list with a large amount of people, you could include them in the BCC field. No one would be able to see anyone else’s email address – if you CC’d these people instead, you would be exposing their email addresses and they’d see a long list of CC’d emails in their email program. You could even put your own email address in the To field and include every other address in the BCC field, hiding everyone’s email address from each other.