Emacs/emacs/Rmail-Reply

33.10 Sending Replies

Rmail has several commands to send outgoing mail. See Sending Mail, for information on using Message mode, including certain features meant to work with Rmail. What this section documents are the special commands of Rmail for entering the mail buffer used to compose the outgoing message. Note that the usual keys for sending mail—C-x m, C-x 4 m, and C-x 5 m—also work normally in Rmail mode.

m: Send a message (rmail-mail).
c: Continue editing the already started outgoing message (rmail-continue).
r: Send a reply to the current Rmail message (rmail-reply).
f: Forward the current message to other users (rmail-forward).
C-u f: Resend the current message to other users (rmail-resend).
M-m: Try sending a bounced message a second time (rmail-retry-failure).

The most common reason to send a message while in Rmail is to reply to the message you are reading. To do this, type r (rmail-reply). This displays a mail composition buffer in another window, much like C-x 4 m, but preinitializes the ‘Subject’, ‘To’, ‘CC’, ‘In-Reply-To’ and ‘References’ header fields based on the message you are replying to. The ‘To’ field starts out as the address of the person who sent the message you received, and the ‘CC’ field starts out with all the other recipients of that message.

You can exclude certain recipients from being included automatically in replies, using the variable mail-dont-reply-to-names. Its value should be a regular expression; any recipients that match are excluded from the ‘CC’ field. They are also excluded from the ‘To’ field, unless this would leave the field empty. If this variable is nil, then the first time you compose a reply it is initialized to a default value that matches your own address.

To reply only to the sender of the original message, enter the reply command with a numeric argument: C-u r or 1 r. This omits the ‘CC’ field completely for a particular reply.

Once the mail composition buffer has been initialized, editing and sending the mail goes as usual (see Sending Mail). You can edit the presupplied header fields if they are not what you want. You can also use commands such as C-c C-y, which yanks in the message that you are replying to (see Mail Commands). You can also switch to the Rmail buffer, select a different message there, switch back, and yank the new current message.

Sometimes a message does not reach its destination. Mailers usually send the failed message back to you, enclosed in a failure message. The Rmail command M-m (rmail-retry-failure) prepares to send the same message a second time: it sets up a mail composition buffer with the same text and header fields as before. If you type C-c C-c right away, you send the message again exactly the same as the first time. Alternatively, you can edit the text or headers and then send it. The variable rmail-retry-ignored-headers, in the same format as rmail-ignored-headers (see Rmail Display), controls which headers are stripped from the failed message when retrying it.

Another frequent reason to send mail in Rmail is to forward the current message to other users. f (rmail-forward) makes this easy by preinitializing the mail composition buffer with the current message as the text, and a subject of the form [from: subject], where from and subject are the sender and subject of the original message. All you have to do is fill in the recipients and send. When you forward a message, recipients get a message which is from you, and which has the original message in its contents.

Rmail offers two formats for forwarded messages. The default is to use the MIME format (see Rmail Display). This includes the original message as a separate part. You can use a simpler format if you prefer, by setting the variable rmail-enable-mime-composing to nil. In this case, Rmail just includes the original message enclosed between two delimiter lines. It also modifies every line that starts with a dash, by inserting ‘- ’ at the start of the line. When you receive a forwarded message in this format, if it contains something besides ordinary text—for example, program source code—you might find it useful to undo that transformation. You can do this by selecting the forwarded message and typing M-x unforward-rmail-message. This command extracts the original forwarded message, deleting the inserted ‘- ’ strings, and inserts it into the Rmail file as a separate message immediately following the current one.

Resending is an alternative similar to forwarding; the difference is that resending sends a message that is from the original sender, just as it reached you—with a few added header fields (‘Resent-From’ and ‘Resent-To’) to indicate that it came via you. To resend a message in Rmail, use C-u f. (f runs rmail-forward, which invokes rmail-resend if you provide a numeric argument.)

Use the m (rmail-mail) command to start editing an outgoing message that is not a reply. It leaves the header fields empty. Its only difference from C-x 4 m is that it makes the Rmail buffer accessible for C-c C-y, just as r does.

The c (rmail-continue) command resumes editing the mail composition buffer, to finish editing an outgoing message you were already composing, or to alter a message you have sent.

If you set the variable rmail-mail-new-frame to a non-nil value, then all the Rmail commands to start sending a message create a new frame to edit it in. This frame is deleted when you send the message.

All the Rmail commands to send a message use the mail-composition method that you have chosen (see Mail Methods).