Addressing emails (Forwarding, CC & BCC)

1. Forward

Forwarding an email sends the message to a contact not included in the original “To” field.

Choose to forward an email instead if the contact receiving the forwarded message does not need to receive future messages in the thread.

2. Cc

An email cc, or carbon copy, is similar to forwarding in that the preceding message thread gets sent to a new recipient.

Contacts who are carbon copied on an email are usually affected by the message, but the sender has directly addressed the email content to a different group of people. Carbon copies are preferred when a recipient needs to be kept informed of the correspondence thread without personally contributing, such as to observe compliance or be notified that a business transaction is underway.

Employees sometimes use reply all and carbon copy together. You might use reply all with carbon copy if you notice that an employee who should have been in the previous message correspondence was not listed in the “To” or “cc” fields. This method both notifies current recipients of the new contact added to the thread and ensures that the new recipient receives future responses.

Don’t overuse this field, as you’ll unnecessarily clutter peoples’ inboxes

3. Bcc

When you add a contact to the bcc field, or blind carbon copy, the email thread conceals their email address from the other recipients.

Blind carbon copy emails are useful when a new employee joins an existing message thread, but others don’t need to be notified of the new contact or send the new contact future content related to the thread.

Bcc is also a safe choice when you’re sending an email to people who do not need to correspond with one another about the message topic in the future. Blind copying multiple contacts can be especially helpful when sending mass emails out to a list of clients, contractors or the full company.

When someone is CC’d or BCC’d and the email is not addressed to them they will not prioritize the email, so be clear when you CC or BCC