Re: ‘Reply’ vs ‘followup’ (was: Test email)

[Dmitry Alexandrov]

Rafi Khan <rafi@rafikhan.io> wrote:
> Alberto Luaces <aluaces@udc.es> writes:
> 1. I am using Gmail as the backend and received Dmitry Alexandrov's reply in 
> my inbox, but for some reason your reply wasn't there.

He have not addressed you for some reason, cf. ‘To’ and (absent) ‘Cc’ headers 
in his mail.  While they are merely informational, they are usually true.


> 2. What is the difference between replying and forwarding in mailing lists?
>
> Should I be doing "F" or "R".

‘r’ and ‘R’¹ are above-mentioned ‘reply to sender only’ commands.  Indeed, 
docstring (<f1> k r) is unclear:

| (gnus-summary-reply &optional YANK WIDE VERY-WIDE)
|
| Start composing a mail reply to the current message.
| If prefix argument YANK is non-nil, the original article is yanked
| automatically.
| If WIDE, make a wide reply.
| If VERY-WIDE, make a very wide reply.

Manual entry (<f1> K r) is fine, though:

| ‘S r’
| ‘r’
|      Mail a reply to the author of the current article
|      (‘gnus-summary-reply’).

In other words, these are rarely needed commands.  The need to drop extra 
recipients from reply is rare, and even in these cases itʼs often easier just 
to purge ‘Cc’ line.


As for ‘f’ and ‘F’, they do _not_ stay for ‘forwarding’, but for 
‘following-up’.  Contrary to what @asjo@koldfront.dk have said [0], they are 
_not_ for posting to [news]group only, but are supposed to be ‘do what I mean’ 
commands for replying: in Usenet — post to group (S n), in mail — reply to all 
(S w).

‘DWIM’ breaks, though, when you are reading mail gatewayed to Usenet or an 
isolated NNTP server such as Gmane.

Then you have to mark newsgroups that are really mailing lists first.  You can 
do that on one by one basis by setting ‘to-list’ parameter on them — Iʼve 
already explained how to do that [1], but really you want to mark all 
mail-to-news groups at once:

        (setq gnus-mailing-list-groups
              (rx bol (opt "nntp" (1+ nonl) ":") (or "gmane."
                                                     "linux."
                                                     "mozilla.")))

Now you can use ‘f’ / ‘F’ instead of ‘S w’ / ‘S W’ just as intended.

[0] <875zaverel.fsf@tullinup.koldfront.dk>
[1] <eepkuhaa.dag@gnui.org>

-
¹ FWIW, I suggest you to use lower-case variants, followed by C-c C-y if you 
need quotation.

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