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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.
July 24, 2025
6 Fyxer AI Alternatives: From email clients to add-on tools
We cover Fyxer AI’s key features and compare them to alternatives like Gmelius and Missive, helping you choose the best tool for your inbox.
As AI continues to grow in popularity, email management is one of the most competitive spaces for AI tools. Fyxer AI has gained a lot of attention, promising to save you one hour a day as your AI assistant dedicated to meeting and email management.
This article will break down what Fyxer AI is and some alternatives that exist in the market.
Fyxer AI is an AI assistant that connects to your Gmail or Outlook inbox. It does three things well:
It genuinely feels like a capable assistant that manages your email directly within your existing Gmail/Outlook inbox. There's no new interface to learn, no complex installation. Just an organized "person" who opened your messy inbox and took over, in a way that still granted you control over what's sent out.
Within 10 minutes of setting up Fyxer AI, all my emails were auto-tagged into one of their default labels (I use Gmail):
To enable auto-drafting of replies, you have to give Fyxer AI's draft prompter a bit of context related to your tone and business.
And here's what an auto-drafted reply looked like:
This is a great experience for anyone who wants to stay in the Gmail or Outlook interface, but really need on-going organization and administrative help because of the high volume of emails that they handle personally.
Like Superhuman, Fyxer AI is focused on inbox throughput—how much faster can you process your emails. Although that's an important goal, often times, it's the wrong goal.
Maybe the question is whether you should be replying to most of those emails in the first place, which we'll get into for some of the Fyxer alternatives.
When looking at Fyxer AI alternatives, we included 3 types:
We'll start with similar functionality and interface and work our way down the list.
Like Fyxer, Gmelius exists on top of your existing Gmail interface so you have a familiar experience with new functionality.
Gmelius also has an AI-powered assistant that auto-categorizes and can draft replies on your behalf. There are small details between the two options, for example:
On the other hand, Gmelius is also a collaboration focused tool instead of a purely productivity focused tool like Fyxer, which means Gmelius has more functionality for teams that work together within an inbox. They have the ability to chat internally on emails, assign emails to others, create automations that run based on certain AI tagging, SLA escalation, and more.
Both Gmelius and Fyxer have a closed AI assistant, meaning you're not able to bring your own AI key and select the models that you work with. This is great for those who don't really have a preference on which AI model they prefer.
From a pricing perspective, Gmelius is a little bit more expensive than Fyxer:
If you're looking for a Fyxer alternative that is a little more oriented to teams but has much of the same functionality and interface, then Gmelius might be the one.
Similar to Gmelius, Hiver integrates directly into your existing email client, giving you a familiar interface to work with. Unlike Gmelius, Hiver supports Gmail and Outlook accounts.
Like Fyxer, Hiver has an AI-powered email assistant that can help you auto-draft emails and auto-label emails based on their contents. Though, like Gmelius, it's not quite as simple as Fyxer's default experience since Hiver's core users are customer support teams working out of shared inboxes.
If you're an executive that's just looking to replace Fyxer's lightweight functionality, without any of the team related features like collaboration, automated workflows, analytics, or SLA monitoring, then Hiver might be a little overkill.
Could you get it to work? Absolutely. Will it feel like it was built for your use case? Probably not.
From a pricing perspective, Hiver's plans that include AI start at $19/user/month billed annually. However, there are limitations on how many AI-drafted replies you can have (20/user/day).
Now we're moving onto tools with more functionality than Fyxer, but will also have a less familiar interface.
Missive is an email client for teams that need to collaborate in their inbox. Like Fyxer, you can create AI-powered email assistants that help you triage, label, and draft replies. Unlike Fyxer, Missive is way more flexible in implementation, which depending on who you are, could be a good or bad thing.
Missive allows you to bring your own AI key and choose your own model. That means if you want to use a specific model for drafting emails versus triaging, you can fine tune that experience.
Since Missive is a collaborative inbox meant for your whole team, your AI assistant can assign and triage emails to the right people, instead of just sorting it in your own inbox. Imagine an old client emails you because you have a long standing relationship, but it's a question meant for your support team.
The same is true for drafting replies, instead of just drafting replies based on your own personal inbox, Missive's AI automations can help your whole team auto-draft replies to customers.
That's critical if you're handling hundreds if not thousands of emails every day. You can get the most common questions taken care of by an AI assistant.
Where Missive lacks compared to Fxyer is it's scheduling and calendar functionality. Missive has a calendar that's good for team visibility but it's lacking any AI assistant features.
From a pricing perspective, Missive is comparable to Fyxer at $24/user/month for plans that include AI automations.
If you're looking for an AI-powered email client, essentially Fyxer but with more features, then Shortwave might be a good fit.
Shortwave has all of Fyxer's AI assistant features right out of the box—auto-drafting emails, default AI categorization, calendar scheduling—and they have some team collaboration features as well.
Since Shortwave is it's own email client, it looks and feels quite different from Gmail and Outlook. It also only supports Gmail accounts. They say there's a workaround for Microsoft 365, Outlook and other email providers, but it's essentially forwarding your email account to a Gmail account, to connect to Shortwave.
If you don't want or need the level of customization and flexibility that Missive has, you don't care to BYOK (Bring your own keys), and you use Gmail/Google Workspace—Shortwave could be a good Fyxer alternative for you.
From a pricing perspective, Shortwave is the exact same pricing as Missive at $24/user/month for plans with full fledge AI functionality.
If you mostly loved Fyxer for it's ability to sort and organize emails, there are AI-powered tools like Clean Email that focus exclusively on that. And for your drafting needs, you can use Copilot or Gemini (depending on if you're a Gmail or Outlook user) as your AI assistant to help draft the occasional email.
Like Fyxer, Clean Email is a tool that works within your existing email client. It has some predetermined categories that it will suggest and label your emails as, and it can learn your preferences over time.
Copilot is a general AI-assistant that comes free with the Microsoft suite. You can use simple prompts like: Check for typos and make it more professional.
Or more complex prompts like:
You're an executive assistant replying to emails on my behalf. Make sure to take into consideration the existing tone of the conversation and match it. If it's a customer or prospective client asking about a specific product question, use https://learn.missiveapp.com/ to find the answer. Do not make up any information.
From a pricing perspective, Clean Email is $9.99/month/email account and Copilot has a free plan typically included in your Microsoft 365 subscription, with Pro plans starting at $30/user/month.
An alternative to Clean Email and Copilot would be SaneBox and Gemini. Incredibly similar functionality and features, with minor differences around user interface. Gemini would also be a better fit for anyone already in the Gmail/Google Workspace ecosystem.
Where SaneBox stands out in comparison to both Clean Email and Fyxer is it's third party integrations. By offering connections to other popular tools like ToDoist, SaneBox allows you to create basic automated workflows within your inbox. Something in between Missive's super flexible and powerful automations and Fyxer's one and only integration to HubSpot.
From a pricing perspective, SaneBox starts at $7/user/month with some usage limits. Google's Gemini has a free option, with paid plans starting at $19.99/month
Fyxer AI offers a compelling solution for tackling email management, seamlessly integrating with your Gmail or Outlook to help you regain valuable time. Its strengths in triaging emails, drafting replies, and note-taking make it a strong contender in today’s crowded AI productivity tool landscape.
However, it’s worth considering various alternatives like Gmelius, Missive, or Shortwave, each bringing unique features and interfaces that could better align with your specific needs.
As AI productivity tools continue to innovate and redefine how we interact with our inboxes, exploring your options will ensure you find the perfect fit to enhance your productivity.
March 25, 2025
Outlook vs Gmail for Business: Which is better?
Welcome to the great business email debate—Gmail or Outlook?
Welcome to the great business email debate—Gmail or Outlook?
Emails are the lifeblood of many businesses. They’re how people inquire about your services, it's how you communicate with clients and vendors, and maybe it's even how you communicate internally with your team.
We'll be doing an in-depth analysis of the two big email providers (Gmail vs Outlook). And give you the information you need to make a decision on which email service you'd like to build your communication system from.
We'll be going over:
There are two ways to create an email with Google.
You can either have a free, personal email address that ends in @gmail.com, with limited storage (15gb across your Google Suite), or you can pay for Google Workspace (Gmail for business) and create an email address with your business domain: @yourcompany.com, have more storage, and more admin/security controls over your email service.
The Google Workspace business plans vary:
Whether you have a Gmail account or a Google Workspace account, your inbox will look similar.
This is where Google shines. Their real-time collaborative documents were a game changer when they launched back in 2006 and has become the preferred tools for many organizations since.
When looking at Gmail's security measures for Google Workspace accounts, here are two that stand out:
Gmail uses TLS for email transit and has encryption at rest and in transit.
With over 1.8 billion Gmail users worldwide, there are some very well known issues and tradeoffs within the Gmail's functionality. Here are three common ones:
Like Gmail, Outlook is Microsoft's free, personal email service; Microsoft 365 is essentially Outlook for business, equivalent to Google Workspace.
Here's an overview of the Microsoft 365 plans (assuming an annual payment, as of April 1, 2025):
With thousands of enterprise customers, Outlook's security and privacy are tuned for those standards.
And just like Gmail, Outlook uses TLS encryption for email in transit. And data at rest is also encrypted.
As with most decisions in life, it depends.
Google Workspace is collaborative at its core, though its shared inbox and email automation options are more limited.
Microsoft Outlook is more robust in it's DNA overall, but can feel overly complex and lacking in modern design.
If your business prioritizes simplicity and collaboration with clients, team members, and vendors—I would err on the side of Gmail and Google Workspace.
If you work in a field with a lot of sensitive information (i.e. law, accounting, etc), then I would err on the side of Outlook and their very high standard for security controls.
Whether you choose Gmail or Outlook, there are some business email hygiene factors to follow:
Neither Outlook or Gmail was really designed for teams. They added on some lightweight features (shared mailboxes), but if you truly live in your inbox everyday, replying to clients, team members, and vendors—you'll want something designed specifically for team collaboration and shared inboxes.
That would be us—Missive!
Missive is an email client that sits on top of your chosen email service—whether that's Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, or Apple Mail.
It has all the features that are loved in Gmail and Outlook—labels, rules, snoozing, but supercharged with more functionality. Including AI powered rules that allow for auto-translation, auto-labeling, and so much more.
But don't just take our word for it, here's Arif, a lawyer and long time Outlook user, who recently signed up for Missive:
When I open Missive, I can hit Inbox Zero quickly. I never had that feeling with Outlook.
And here's Pat, a property manager and Gmail user, who recently signed up for Missive:
We’ve tried so many shared inbox solutions. Missive was unexpectedly powerful. Suddenly, we weren’t scrambling over lost emails or letting days slip by.
So whether you're Team Gmail for business or Team Outlook for business—you can try Missive today and get the best collaborative email client for businesses.
