Say you cc someone on an email. We’ve talked about the expectations there before, but that was largely from setting expectations as a sender. As a receiver, who then replies, what are those expectations?

In my experience, it’s random whether the people replying include the cc’d people or not. I’m not entirely sure if this is a technical thing. For example, different mail clients might choose to include the cc’d recipient in the most prominent reply-button functionality. It could be a brain thing too. For example, someone thinking “the sender here cc’d some people, but that was a one-time thing, I’m not going to reply to all of them because it is nobody’s intention to continue hitting those people’s inboxes”.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t usually jive with what I’m hoping. When I cc someone on an email response, I’m hoping the next response also includes those cc’d people. If that doesn’t happen, I gotta do something awkward like this:

I’m including Quinn and Jake on this email response again. I looped them in last time because they’ll need this information too. Let’s keep them on this email thread for now.

To prevent that, it might be work doing this pre-emptively:

I’ve included Quinn and Jake on this email. Please reply to all of us for now as they’ll need to be looped in on this information as well.

The clarity probably doesn’t hurt there. Also might be worth just adding them as additional recipients rather than literally using the cc function.