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Email: what do CC and BCC stand for?

In email, the Cc: command is straightforward enough, as it says ‘send a copy of the message to an address other than the main recipient’ (the address that you place in the To: field).

So if you want to send a message to more than one recipient, at least one address will have to go in the To: field. The other addresses can also go in the To: field or they can go in the Cc: field. Everybody gets a copy of the message, and all recipients can see who else the message has been sent to.

Blind carbon copies are used to send a copy of an email to a recipient without any of the other recipients being aware that the Bcc’d recipient got a copy of the email.

Bcc says ‘send a copy to another address...but in this case, don’t indicate to the recipient that you sent this copy’. Most people consider this to be somewhat sneaky or unprofessional, not the least because Bcc is used prevalently in bulk email. The main recipient is the person sending the bulk mail, and all the other recipients are added to the Bcc list.

Like any other form of technological development though, it’s not the invention that’s at fault, but the people who use it in the wrong way. In fact, Bcc has some very good uses. One of these is in protecting the privacy of the individual recipients of your email. Imagine your friendly marriage counsellor sending Season’s Greetings at Christmas to all her clients using nothing but the Cc: field … not a good thing.

Another good use for Bcc is in the prevention of spam. Internet spam comes devoid of egg or chips. It’s unsolicited and often annoying emails sent to us by people to whom we’ve never been introduced but still find it appropriate to invade our privacy with the cyber version of junk-mail through a letter-box.

Ever wondered how they get a hold of your address? Well the Cc: field in a widely circulated email is a dead give-away. Bcc: can be used to hide email addresses so that you don’t disclose everyone’s email address to everyone else. That way, when you send a message to a group of friends or colleagues, or forward an email to our favourite mailing-list, you can ensure that other peoples’ addresses don’t get forwarded all across the Internet.

So, in summary, the three address fields in an email message are:
The To: field.
This contains the addresses of the primary recipients of an email, from whom you would expect a response, if any.