What is CC (Carbon Copy) in email?
Still have a question, spotted an error, or have a better explanation or a source we should cite?
CC stands for Carbon Copy. It's a field in your email where you can add extra recipients who'll see the message and see everyone else who got it.
The name comes from typewriter days. You'd sandwich a sheet of carbon paper between two pages so everything typed on top copied to the bottom. Today, it just means "send a visible copy to these people too."
So when When you CC someone, their email address shows up in the header of every copy sent. Everyone on the To line, everyone on the CC line, everyone can see who else is included. It's useful for keeping stakeholders in the loop without requiring them to respond. Your boss CCs you on a client thread? You're informed, but the client knows you're not the primary contact.
Why this matters for email senders: If you're sending newsletters or marketing campaigns, you should almost never use CC. Why? Because every subscriber will see every other subscriber's email address. That's a privacy violation in most jurisdictions (hello GDPR), it looks unprofessional, and it trains spam filters to flag your domain. Marketing emails go in the To field (or BCC for small batches where you must protect privacy). BCC hides recipient addresses from each other, which is what you want for bulk sends.
So CC is for one-to-one or small-group work emails where transparency about who's included is the point. It's not for campaigns.
Contributors
Who worked on this answer
Every name links to their profile. Every company links to their site. Real people, real accountability.
