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Introduction
There are several variables that control what happens when you press
the "R" command to reply to a message or follow-up a post in a newsgroup,
in this section we will describe the process and variables that control
this command.
Configuring Options Related to Replying
The following is a list of configuration options that are related to
what happens when you reply to a message using Pine. Those configurations
marked with a star * need to be set/unset in order to
reduce prompting of Pine
- *, controls if Pine
will automatically include the text being replied to in the message that
you will compose. If you have not enabled this feature then Pine will
confirm with you if you want to include the text in the reply. Remember
that the position of the quoted text with respect to the signature is
controlled by the variable signature-at-bottom. You need to set this
variable in order to reduce prompting.
- . There's almost nothing that can be
done to reduce prompting in this case. This question appears when there's
more than one recipient of the message (e.g, there's a non empty Cc: field
in the message). The interesting behavior happens when Pine does not
recognize that the address of the recipient is your address. In that case,
you'll be asked if you want to reply to all recipients. In order to avoid
Pine asking you if you want to reply to your own address, you should add
your e-mail address to the alt-addresses configuration option.
- , is a configuration option that
will automatically include the attachments of the original message in the
message that you are replying to. Notice that if you do not enable this
option Pine will not include the attachments in the message you are
replying to. Pine will not prompt you if you want to include the
attachments or not.
- , will make
Pine include headers of the original message as part of the message that
you send. The headers that will be included will be those that are visible
for you at the time you start to reply the message, which is controlled by
two variables: The viewer-hdrs configuration option,
or if you have the display of full headers on or off, according to the H Headers command. In other words, you can not
configure automatically which headers will be included in the reply
message.
- has the
effect of setting the address that you will be replying to, being the same
that the Reply-To header field in the original message. If you do not set
this option, then Pine will prompt you if you want to use the reply-to
address. If you say no, then Pine will assume that you want to reply to
the address in the From: field.
- is already discussed in the
signature section.
- is already discussed in the
signature section.
- , is a configuration option that controls
what string will be prepended to every line of quoted text of the message
that you are replying to. The most usual convention is to use "> " as the
reply indent string, but you can change it. Note that if you want to leave
a space at the end of the string, you must enclose the whole definition of
the string between double quotes. Note that you can not use double quotes
in your definition for this variable, as they will not be correctly
interpreted by Pine.
Another interesting feature is that Pine allows this token to be
variable, by using some tokens, the most commonly used is _INIT_, which
when used will be replaced by the initials of the name of the person that
sent the message. Usually you would use this to define this variable as
"_INIT_> ", or something similar.
This option is not only used when replying, but also when quoting text.
In fact, if while you are composing a message you decide to insert a
message that is located in the same folder that you are composing your
message, then this text will be quoted using the string defined in this
variable, with no opportunity to edit it.
Finally notice that some people are sensitive to the fact that you use a
different reply indent string than the default "> ". This is because some
newsreaders color quoted text and using a different string breaks this
coloring. Pine, for example, does not recognize other prefixes when
coloring than the default "> ".
- *,
controls if the text to be replied to will be quoted with the defined
quoting string or if, for the message that you are replying to, it must be
changed. Note that you can use tokens to define the reply-indent-string
(which is defined in the reply-indent-string variable), even when you are
editing this string.
Note that if you set this option, Pine will prompt you to include the
message in the composer, regardless of how you have set the variable include-text-in-reply, so if your purpose is to reduce
prompting, you should unset this option.
- , is a configuration
variable which allows you to define one line of text that is included at
the before the quoted text, to introduce it. If this variable is not
initialized, then Pine will write a default text, which contains the date
in which the message was sent and the name (or address, if there's no
name) of the person that sent the message. It would usually look like:
On Sun, 25 Dec 2000, Santa Claus wrote:
There is a way to configure the text in this line using tokens, tokens,
which is special text that that is replaced by a content which depends on
the message. For example, _FROM_ is a token, which when replaced in the
line produces the personal name of the person that sent the message. All
tokens begin and the end with the underscore "_" character. In the example
above, the value of _FROM_ is "Santa Claus". The above reply leadin-string
is defined in fact to be:
On _DAYDATE_, _FROM_ wrote:
Notice, however, that if there's no personal name in the message that you
are replying to, and just an e-mail address, then the value of the _FROM_
token is that e-mail address. The _ADDRESS_ token, however, always
contains the e-mail address of the person in the From: field of the
message.
One way to make the above leadin-string more sophisticated, is by changing
its definition to be
On _DAYDATE_, _FROM_ (_ADDRESS_) wrote:
In the case of the above example, the reply-leading text for a message from Santa would look like:
On Sun, 25 Dec 2000, Santa Claus (santa@northpole.com) wrote:
This definition works most of the time, except that if Santa had not
written his personal name, in whose case it would look like:
On Sun, 25 Dec 2000, santa@northpole.com (santa@northpole.com) wrote:
with the repetition of the quoting of the address of Santa. The good news
is that Pine provides a mechanism so that the address be inserted
only once!. In fact, here's how to.
Pine has a mechanism to make an "if, then", statement, which is very
handy, the format is very simple:
_TOKEN_("condition", "text1", "text2")
Here _TOKEN_ is one of the possible tokens, like _ADDRESS_, condition is
just text, and the value of _TOKEN_ and "condition" are going to be
compared. If they are the same, then "text1" is used, but if they are
different then "text2" is used.
Here's an example:
*** _FROM_ _ADDRESS_("_FROM_", "","(_ADDRESS_) ")wrote
_SMARTDATE_("Today", "today", "on _LONGDATE_"):
In this case, when the reply leadin is constructed, the text always starts
with the "*** _FROM_" part, then _ADDRESS_ is compared with the value of
_FROM_ (not with the text "_FROM_"), and if they are the same (which means
that there is no personal name in the From: field), then it does not write
anything, but if they are different (which means that _FROM_ contains the
personal name of the person sending the message, and _ADDRESS_ his/her
address), then write "(_ADDRESS_) ". Note that in order to account for the
space after the fist _FROM_, we must put together wrote and the last
parenthesis. Finally, the value of _SMARTDATE_ is compared with the text
"Today", if they are the same, then it will insert the text "today", which
is more appropriate since it is not the beginning of a sentence, but if
they are different it will insert a "on _LONGDATE_" text. Below you can
read all different possibilities that this leads to:
*** _FROM_ (_ADDRESS_) wrote today:
*** _FROM_ (_ADDRESS_) wrote on _LONGDATE_:
*** _FROM_ wrote today:
*** _FROM_ wrote on _LONGDATE_:
As you can see there's a lot of complexity that can be added to this
structure. Also notice that the text to be replaced with, must not contain
another conditional inclusion, Pine only notices the first level of
conditional inclusion of text.
Finally notice that regardless of what your definition for this string is,
Pine will cut it, if necessary, so that it will not be bigger than 80
characters.
Replying to a Message
In order to reply to a message, you must press the key, either when reading the message you are about to
reply to or when you are in the index screen. What will happen next will
depend on how you have configured Pine.
For starters, Pine checks to see if there is a "Newsgroups:" header in
the message that you are replying to. If there is one, and is not empty,
then Pine will offer you a menu with three possibilities:
- F Followup-to, is used if you want your
answer to be posted in the newsgroup(s) that appear in the Newsgroups:
header. The replied message won't go to the e-mail address of the sender.
- [R Reply], is the default option and should be
pressed if you want your reply to go to the e-mail address of the sender,
but not to the newsgroup.
- B Both, is the equivalent of a "mailed and
posted" action. The replied message will go to both, the e-mail address of
the sender and the newsgroup(s) specified in the Newsgroups: header.
If the message that you are replying to does not have a non-empty
Newsgroups: header, or if it has one and you answered with either one of
the above answers, then Pine will immediately check if the configuration
options include-text-in-reply and enable-reply-indent-string-editing are enabled, if the
second one is enabled, then Pine will ask you if you want to include the
text of the original message in the replied message, and will give you a
choice to edit it if you want to. If the second configuration option is
not enabled, then Pine will include the text or not according to if the
include-text-in-reply option is enabled or not. If you enable the
enable-reply-indent-string-editing, you need to press ^R to be able to
edit the reply-indent-string.
Once you have passed this stage, Pine will check to see if there is a
Reply-To: in the original message, and act according to the rules
explained before in the reply-always-uses-reply-to
configuration option.
Finally Pine will check to see if there were more recipients of the
original message, and ask you if you want to include their addresses in
the message to be replied to. If you decide to do so, their addresses will
be included in the Cc: field. Notice that if you decided to use the
Reply-To field to answer and you decide to reply to all recipients, then
Pine will not include the address in the From: field in the list of
recipients.