Replying

VM has special commands that make it easy to reply to a message. When a reply command is invoked VM fills in the subject and recipient headers for you, since it is apparent to whom the message should be sent and what the subject should be. There is an old convention of prepending the string `"Re: "' to the subject of replies if the string isn't present already. VM supports this indirectly by providing the variable vm-reply-subject-prefix. Its value should be a string to prepend to the subject of replies, if the said string isn't present already. A nil value means don't prepend anything to the subject (this is the default). In any case you can edit any of the message headers manually, if you wish.

VM also helps you quote material from a message to which you are replying by providing included text as a feature of some of the commands. Included text is a copy of the message being replied to with some fixed string prepended to each line so that included text can be distinguished from the text of the reply. The variable vm-included-text-prefix specifies what the prepended string will be.

The variable vm-included-text-attribution-format specifies the format for the attribution of included text. This attribution is a line of text that tells who wrote the text that is to be included; it will be inserted before the included text. If non-nil, the value of vm-included-text-attribution-format should be a string format specifiation similar to vm-summary-format. See section Summaries. A nil value causes the attribution to be omitted.

The variable vm-in-reply-to-format specifies the format of the In-Reply-To header that is inserted into header section of the reply buffer. Like vm-included-text-attribution-format, vm-in-reply-to-format should be a string similar to that of vm-summary-format. A nil value causes the In-Reply-To header to be omitted.

The recipient headers generated for reply messages are created by simply copying the appropriate headers for the message to which you are replying. This includes any full name information, comments, etc. in these headers. If the variable vm-strip-reply-headers is non-nil, the reply headers will stripped of all information but the actual addresses.

The reply commands are:

r (vm-reply)

Replies to the author of the current message.

R (vm-reply-include-text)

Replies to the author of the current message and provides included text.

f (vm-followup)

Replies to the all recipients of the current message.

F (vm-followup-include-text)

Replies to the all recipients of the current message and provides included text.

These commands all accept a numeric prefix argument n, which if present, causes VM to reply to the next (or previous if the argument is negative) n-1 message as well as the current message. Also all the reply commands set the "replied" attribute of the messages to which you are responding, but only when the reply is actually sent. The reply commands can also be applied to marked messages, see section Message Marks.

If you are one of multiple recipients of a message and you use f and F, your address will be included in the recipients of the reply. You can avoid this by judicious use of the variable vm-reply-ignored-addresses. Its value should be a list of regular expressions that match addresses that VM should automatically remove from the recipient headers of replies.