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Cc & Bcc in Email: What Do They Mean & When to Use Them
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by
Ludovic Armand
January 30, 2024
· Updated on
Emails have been around for a really long time now.
They were originally created as the digital version of mail and borrowed some terminology and core concept from it. Some of these terms that are coming from the paper era are CC and BCC.
If you ever wondered: What does it mean to CC someone in an email? You’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll explore what CC means in email and how to use it. Let’s dive into it.
CC means carbon copy. It's a field in the header of an email that lets you to send a copy of an email to other recipients. When someone is in CC, they can see the email thread, recipients, including other people in CC.
It's a good way to keep other people informed about what is discussed in an email. However, it’s important to know that, unlike the regular recipients of an email, the content of an email is generally not addressed to CC recipients and are not necessarily involved in the conversation.
For example, you may contact a potential client via email and want to keep someone else in your team informed about how things are going with that lead. In that case, adding your colleague in the CC might be a good option as they will be able to see the email thread, but their input won’t be necessary for the conversation.
You can learn more about the history of CC and BCC here.
BCC stands for blind carbon copy. It is very similar to the CC feature, but with one major exception:
When you BCC someone on an email, other recipients of the email won’t be able to see it.
This means that the recipients in the "To" and "CC" fields won’t know that you included a BCC recipient in the email.
It is most used when you want to send a copy of an email to someone but don’t want the recipient of an email to know about it. It could be useful if you need to keep someone informed without revealing their identity to others.
The BCC will receive emails just like any other recipients of the email, but their presence won’t be known by anyone else than you and them.
You should always use BCC with care as it comes with some ethical implications around privacy, transparency, trust, honesty, integrity, and even compliance.
The main difference between CC and BCC in emails is that depending on the one used, other recipients might not be aware that the copy has been sent to someone.
When you CC someone on an email, all recipients will be able to see who received the email and their email addresses. CC is used when you want multiple people to be informed and don’t mind other’s knowing about it.
On the other hand, when you BCC someone, their email address is hidden from other recipients. Recipients are unaware of the presence of BCCs unless they have been mentioned by the sender. BCC is used when you want to discreetly let someone be informed about a conversation without the other recipients knowing.
CC promotes transparency, trust, and in a certain way collaboration among recipients, while BCC maintains confidentiality and privacy. While CC recipients are not expected to actively participate in the conversation, they easily can add their input at any moment. However, BCC recipients remain passive observers.
CC is a useful tool in your email arsenal. It’s quick and easy to use and provides a good way to improve communication. But from a technical point of view, it is almost identical to the “To” field. The difference lies in the email “conventions”. The “To” field is for recipients the email is originally addressed to and the CC field is for people you want to be informed or want in the loop.
CC is a good way to share information with people who are not the primary recipients of an email but want them to be able to see a conversation. CC allows them to stay informed and provides them with context.
However, as we’ll see below, there are some situations where CC is not the best option to use.
When you want to introduce a new person to an existing email conversation, CC should be used. By CC'ing the new participant, you include them in the conversation and let them see the previous discussions. This way, they will be able to quickly catch up on the context and contribute to the conversation.
This use case also applies when you’re emailing someone to introduce them to another person, as the CC’ed person isn’t the person the email is originally addressed to.
Unlike CC, BCC has some specific use cases that couldn’t be replaced by the “To” field. And since the BCC field is hidden from all other recipients, the BCC comes with some advantages.
This is probably the most common use case for the BCC field in email. Imagine you’re sending an email to all participants of an event you’re organizing, but don’t want all recipients to know the email address of each other. You could add all recipients in BCC and your email address in the “To” field. This way, everyone will receive a copy of the email, but won’t be able to see all the other recipients.
Using BCC is a good option if you want to keep a copy of an email in one of your other email addresses without giving it to the recipient.
CC and BCC aren’t all good. They also come with their downside, like the inability to easily exchange with colleagues inside an email thread. Let's take a look at situations when you should think twice before using CC or BCC.
We all know how overwhelming it can be to be overloaded with emails and CC’ing people in almost all your emails is a surefire way to fill someone else’s inbox.
Sending every single email to many can make it difficult for people to prioritize their messages and result in the opposite of what you were trying to achieve; keeping them informed and in the loop. It's best to be mindful and avoid inundating others with unnecessary emails.
Respecting privacy is crucial in all communication methods, and it certainly applies to emails.
Before adding new recipients to a conversation, you should make sure that the recipients accept that you add someone.
There might be sensitive information in the thread that the other person wouldn’t want to share.
If you're hoping for a response or direct action from a recipient, then CC’ing them isn’t your best option. Instead, you should include them in the "To" field.
When you CC someone, they will generally assume that no action is required from them and that they should get involved in the exchanges. To avoid confusion and set clear expectations, you should always put people who need to take action in the primary recipient field.
While CC is a great way to add people to the loop, we’ve seen that it’s easy to overload your colleagues if you indulge in CC’ing too much.
A great alternative to the copy carbon field in email using a collaborative email client like Missive.
Missive is a shared inbox and email management software that let you easily share emails with other team members and discuss with them in a conversation.
CC is a way to send a copy of an email to someone who's not the main recipient. On the other hand, BBC is used to send a copy of an email to someone without the other recipients knowing.
People that are CC'ed will receive replies to the email when someone reply to all, as opposed to the people who are BCC'ed.
You should use CC (carbon copy) when you want to include other recipients who may be interested in or relevant to the email's content, without requiring a response from them. The CC recipients' email addresses will be visible to all other recipients. You should use BCC (blind carbon copy) when you want to secretly include additional recipients without disclosing their email addresses to the other recipients. BCC recipients will still be able to respond and reply to all, but their email addresses will remain hidden.
CC is used in email to send a copy of an email to a secondary recipient that may benefit from the email's content, without having to participate in the discussion.
March 17, 2025
What Is the Best Email Client for Outlook? Our Top 6 Picks
Looking for the best email client for Outlook? We compare the top 6 Outlook alternatives based on collaboration, AI features, security, and pricing. Discover the best option for teams and individuals—whether you need shared inboxes, AI automation, or a unified email experience.
Email is the medium of business. It's how requests, deals, hires, are started and made.
Most businesses live in their inbox, whether they like it or not. And that inbox is likely an Outlook inbox — over 3.7 million companies use Microsoft Outlook for email management.
The are two main reasons for that:
However, like Word or Excel, Outlook was made mostly for enterprise solo use. It wasn't made for collaboration, even as the world of business and email moved towards needing more and more collaboration.
In 2025, several tools meet the security and control standards of Outlook while offering far more powerful inbox collaboration and coordination features suited for modern businesses.
We'll cover what to look for in an Outlook email client, introduce the six most popular third-party options, and break down their key differences.
All options have desktop and mobile email apps and support IMAP, MAPI, and POP3.
Plus, we'll cover a range of price points for the best Outlook alternatives—including ones that are free email clients.
Missive is a collaborative inbox for teams that run on email. This means it is designed with collaboration as a priority, featuring contextual in-email chat using @mentions—eliminating the need for forwarding.
You can assign or watch emails, and every action is logged—giving you visibility into emails and tracking who did what and when.
On top of that, Missive supports all email providers (Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Apple Mail, etc) and you can have multiple accounts (personal and business).
Under the hood, Missive has a powerful automation engine, allowing you to do things like:
From a security perspective, Missive meets the same gold standard as Outlook. They have an SOC 2 Type II report, encryption of data at rest and in transit, and they are GDPR compliant.
For pricing, Missive plans start at $14/user/month on an annual plan.
One thing to note, if you use folders in Outlook, they are called labels in Missive.
In the same way that some teams prefer Google Docs to Word because of their collaboration functionality (commenting, multi-player drafting, etc) — you may prefer Missive as your email app to Outlook, if you find yourself hitting reply all and forward all the time.
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Thunderbird stands out as the only open-source email client.
It's a community-driven, free email client, that has been around for nearly two decades. With a thriving online community and an ecosystem of 1200+ add-ons (including AI-powered ones to help you draft replies), it's considered one of the best email apps for those prioritizing a free and open sourced solution.
If you're looking for an email client that has more collaboration functionality, Thunderbird's collaboration features come mostly from its third-party add-ons—things like mail merging and adding notes/comments to emails. Which makes collaboration possible, but likely a little unreliable given the nature of third-party connections failing from time to time.
From an organization perspective, Thunderbird calls their version of "folders", tags. Functionally, they are the same.
Thunderbird is a very privacy forward email app with built-in filters for phishing/spam and remote image blocking.
Though, it doesn't have the same compliance certifications (i.e. SOC or ISO) due to it's free and open-source nature.
Mailbird is for those of you who have way too many email accounts. It's known for it's unified inbox, where you're able to flow multiple accounts into the same consolidated inbox view.
Mailbird doesn't offer any features related to collaboration or coordination. It's more of a productivity improvement for Outlook power users who would like to integrate a few popular apps into their email workflow and see all emails in one place.
From an AI perspective, Mailbird offers simple AI drafting through ChatGPT.
Of all the Outlook alternatives on this list, Mailbird has the most similar user experience to Outlook—for example, their naming conversions are the same (folders are folders, and not labels or tags).
For security and compliance, Mailbird is only GDPR compliant and does not have any external audits or certifications.
For pricing, Mailbird has a free version as well as a premium version that's $4.99/user/month. There is also a pay once option to buy the product outright at $49.50 (standard) or $99.75 (premium).
If you manage multiple Outlook accounts and need a unified inbox for all your emails, Mailbird might be the perfect solution.
eM Client is a very similar email client to Mailbird. Most of their features are productivity focused for individuals—shortcuts, watch/snooze, configurable layout.
The most unique and powerful feature for eM Client is their search. Not only does the search cover all messages in your inbox, it can also search within certain types of attached files—think PDFs, Word docs, etc.
On the collaboration front, they don't have much beyond the ability to share folders (aka. labels), calendars, and accounts.
Like Mailbird, eM Client offers basic AI drafting to assist with typos and tone in your replies.
On security and compliance, eM Client is GDPR compliant (though possibly outdated with 2018 references) and does not have any external audits or certifications.
For pricing, eM Client has a sharp distinction between personal and business plans. There is a free plan for non-commercial use. The paid plans can be an annual subscription or a one-time payment.
The personal plan (without AI features) is $39.95/year or $49.95 as a one-time payment.
The business plan (with AI features) is $49.95/year or a one-time payment of $188.95.
Both one-time payment options do not include future feature updates. You can purchase lifetime upgrades separately at $90 per license.
If you're looking for a slightly more productive version of Outlook and you want a free email app because you're not using it for commercial purposes—then eM Client might be a good option.
If you're a Mac user and you really don't want to download another email client. Does the out-of-the-inbox (get it?) mail app from Apple work well for Outlook?
Well, compared to Thunderbird, Mailbird, and eM Client—Apple Mail isn't going to give you any increased functionality.
If you use Apple Mail as your Outlook email client, you won't have the integrated calendar or task management, and you'll have to remember that folders are "labels" in Apple Mail.
The good news is that Apple Mail can support multiple accounts from multiple providers (via IMAP and SMTP standards), so if you have a Gmail account and an Outlook account that you would like to unify into one very well designed, simple inbox—Apple Mail can do that.
If you want a free email client with a cleaner design than Outlook and don’t require advanced features, Apple Mail might be your best option.
When Superhuman first came out, it was solely focused on Gmail and Google email users. As of May 2022, they also support Outlook users.
From a user interface perspective, Superhuman is the most distinct of this list. It looks nothing like an Outlook inbox, so if familiarity is a requirement, this might not be a good fit.
Superhuman offers several AI-powered features, the most notable being its ability to answer questions about your inbox.
Instead of traditional search (even as powerful as eM Client's), you can ask your inbox direct questions. Instead of needing to remember a file's name to look for a specific piece of information, you could say: What was the price that John from ACME quoted me?
On the collaboration front, Superhuman offers the ability to @mention your colleagues through Team Comments.
From a security and compliance perspective, they are compliant with SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, CCPA, and GDPR.
For pricing, Superhuman is on the higher end of these email clients, starting at $25/user/month on an annual plan.
To summarize our options for the best email client for Outlook users, we sorted them into two categories:
We hope this has been a helpful overview of the types of email clients that are out there for Outlook users. If you're interested in Missive, continue on and we'll get into some tactical information.
Stephanie at Lighting Dynamics, manages 100+ email quotes a day. Her team used to use Outlook for email management:
With traditional Outlook forwarding, once an email was out of the shared inbox, there was no visibility. We never knew if it had been handled. It was chaotic.
And now, with Missive: "Missive checked all our boxes. It was a huge relief to see we could maintain the shared inbox model—without building custom software from scratch."
Or Kason, from i-SOLIDS, who grew his sales team beyond himself:
We got to a point where we weren't providing the same level of communication, response, and service that allowed us to get to this point. We were relying on Outlook email and it was like 'are you responding to that or am I?'
And after a month with Missive, Kason recommends: "Don't think about just choosing a tool for today but this tool needs to work for scale too—that's a major decision factor."
Get a detailed walk through of how to configure Outlook to Missive, including terminology differences to get you acclimated to your new inbox.
Well like most things, it depends. If you're a team who lives in their inbox day and day out, and you're looking a collaboration-first inbox—we hope you'll give Missive a try.
March 13, 2025
Autopilot for Your Inbox with AI Rules
Revolutionize your inbox with Missive's AI Rules, where artificial intelligence meets your workflow to automatically sort, respond, and organize emails based on what they actually contain.
We've all been there. You open your inbox on Monday morning and face an avalanche of messages. Some need immediate attention. Others could wait. Many should be handled by different team members. And a surprising number don't need any response at all. While Missive's rule engine has always given you the flexibility to automate your workflow exactly how you want it, today we're taking that customization power to a whole new level.
What if your inbox could sort itself? What if it could understand what each email is about and take the right action automatically—all while you maintain complete control over how it behaves? What if you could define exactly how your emails are processed, based not just on who sent them, but on what they actually contain?
Today, we're launching AI Rules in Missive - a simple way to bring the intelligence of AI to your email workflow without the complexity. It's the same flexible rule engine you love, now with the power to understand email content the way you do.
AI Rules are an extension of Missive's existing rules engine. If you've used rules before, you know they're powerful for automating repetitive tasks based on simple conditions like sender address or subject line keywords.
Now, we're adding the ability to use AI to understand what an email is actually about.
Here's how it works:
No training data. No complicated setup. Just plain language instructions that the AI follows.
Let's look at some practical ways teams are already using AI Rules during our beta:
- A ⛑️ customer service team set up a rule that using this prompt:
Is this customer angry or upset? Respond with ONLY "YES" or "NO".
If the AI says YES, the email gets flagged as high priority and assigned to a senior agent.
- A 📈 sales team created a rule with this prompt:
Is this a qualified sales lead or just a general inquiry? Respond with ONLY ONE of these exact words: "sales lead" or "general inquiry".
Leads go straight to the sales pipeline, while general questions route to the support team. Their sales reps now spend more time selling and less time triaging emails.
- A ⚖️ legal firm uses AI to detect if an email contains a deadline or time-sensitive request.
Does this email contain a deadline, due date, or time-sensitive request? Respond with ONLY "YES" or "NO".
If it does, it gets tagged "Urgent" and triggers a notification and creates tasks. They haven't missed a filing deadline since.
The best part? These teams didn't need to become AI experts. They just wrote simple instructions in plain English.
One of the most powerful features of AI Rules is the ability to use the same prompt across multiple rules. This lets you create sophisticated email triage systems without duplicating your AI analysis costs.
For example, you could recreate Gmail's smart categories with more flexibility and control.
First, create a prompt that categorizes emails:
Analyze this email and respond with EXACTLY ONE of these categories:
"SOCIAL" - for messages from social networks, dating sites, etc.
"PROMOTIONS" - for marketing emails, offers, discounts, newsletters
"UPDATES" - for notifications, confirmations, receipts, statements
Then create separate rules, all using this exact same prompt but with different matching conditions:
The beauty of this approach is that the AI only analyzes each email once, even though you have six different rules. The result is cached and reused across all rules, making this both efficient and cost-effective.
And unlike Gmail's fixed categories, you have complete control over:
This is just one example of how you can use AI Rules to create a customized workflow that fits exactly how you and your team want to work.
We've built four powerful AI capabilities into Missive:
As shown above, use AI to analyze email content and make decisions. The AI can detect sentiment, identify request types, or extract specific information that would be difficult to capture with traditional keyword rules.
For example: "Is this customer angry?" or "Does this email contain a deadline?"
Have the AI create a helpful note about an email. The AI can summarize long threads, extract key points, translate emails or provide context for your team.
e.g.
Translate the email to English.
Let the AI identify action items in emails and automatically create tasks. No more manually creating to-dos from your messages. For example:
Extract any tasks or action items from this email and create a task for each one.
Automatically create response drafts for common inquiries. The AI can craft a personalized reply based on the email content, which you can review and send with a click:
Create a helpful response to this customer inquiry about our pricing plans.
The above draft example could be paired with an AI condition that makes sure the email is about billing!
We've worked hard to make AI Rules approachable. You don't need to be a prompt engineer or AI expert to get value from day one. The system uses gpt-4o-mini, which offers an excellent balance of speed, cost-effectiveness, and quality for email processing.
We understand that email contains sensitive information. That's why:
For years, we've been building tools to help teams manage email more efficiently. Rules have always been at the heart of that mission - letting you automate the repetitive stuff so you can focus on the work that matters.
AI Rules take that automation to a new level. Now your inbox doesn't just sort emails based on simple patterns - it understands what they're about and what needs to happen next.
This isn't about replacing human judgment. It's about removing the tedious parts of email management so your team can focus on what humans do best: building relationships, solving complex problems, and delivering value to your customers.
AI Rules are available today for all Missive users on the Productive plan and above. Give them a try, and let us know what you think.
Your inbox will thank you.
Want to learn more about AI Rules? Check out these helpful resources:
