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8.2 Replying to Mail

To compose a reply to a message, use the r (mh-reply) command.

When you reply to a message, you are first prompted with ‘Reply to whom?’. You have several choices here.

Response	Reply Goes To
from	The person who sent the message. This is the default, so RET is sufficient.
to	Replies to the sender, plus all recipients in the ‘To:’ header field.
cc all	Forms a reply to the addresses in the ‘Mail-Followup-To:’ header field if one exists; otherwise forms a reply to the sender, plus all recipients.

Depending on your answer, repl³¹ is given a different argument to form your reply. Specifically, a choice of from or none at all runs ‘repl -nocc all’, and a choice of to runs ‘repl -cc to’. Finally, either cc or all runs ‘repl -cc all -nocc me’. If you find that most of the time you specify one of these choices when you reply to a message, you can change the option mh-reply-default-reply-to from its default value of ‘Prompt’ to one of the choices listed above. You can always edit the recipients in the draft.

Two windows are then created. One window contains the message to which you are replying in an MH-Show buffer. Your draft, in MH-Letter mode (see Editing a Draft), is in the other window. If the reply draft was not one that you expected, check the things that affect the behavior of repl which include the ‘repl:’ profile component and the replcomps and replgroupcomps files.

If you supply a prefix argument (as in C-u r), the message you are replying to is inserted in your reply after having first been run through mhl with the format file mhl.reply. See mhl(1) or the section Using mhl in the MH book to see how you can modify the default mhl.reply file.

Alternatively, you can customize the option mh-yank-behavior and choose one of its ‘Automatically’ variants to do the same thing. See Inserting Letter to Which You’re Replying. If you do so, the prefix argument has no effect.

Another way to include the message automatically in your draft is to use ‘repl: -filter repl.filter’ in your MH profile.

If you include the message automatically, you can hide the MH-Show buffer by turning off the option mh-reply-show-message-flag.

If you wish to customize the header or other parts of the reply draft, please see repl(1) and mh-format(5).