Oh thank you all guys for your answers. Let me practice what i learnt then... this kinda seems the appropriate use case too :)
On Tue, Nov 08, 2016 at 10:00:59AM +1100, Cameron Simpson wrote: > It is pretty rare, but when I need to do it I tag all the source messages > and hit 'g' (group-reply), and then pay careful attention to the to/cc list. Cameron, you meant, hit 'g' always prepended by ';', didn't you? I spent lots of time trying out, because i didn't know about the existence of the ';' function, which i discoverd from a subsequent mail. So simply hitting 'g' was not working. But it's not your fault, i thought if there were tagged entries, the action would automatically refer to all of them, but actually you have to explicitly tell mutt you want to operate on all the tagged entries with ';'. You obviously were silently implying it ;) Anyways here i preferred using 'L' to answer, rather than 'g'. On Tue, Nov 08, 2016 at 12:15:42PM +1100, Erik Christiansen wrote: > > It is pretty rare, but when I need to do it I tag all the source > > messages and hit 'g' (group-reply), and then pay careful attention to > > the to/cc list. > > +1 (but I always hit 'L') Hey Erik, yes indeed, using 'L' is better for mailing lists, in the same way when answering a single mail. > It can work well on a busy thread, both to avoid inflating the thread > with multiple fragmentary replies, and to put all of the information > regarding several facets in one place, for the record. (I use it only > very occasionally.) Exactly, or when someone sends you many mails belonging to the same subject, each one with one question or some additional infos, because maybe he forgot to include them in the fist mail, or he got new updates as the time goes on. At that point i would answer one single mail, keeping the advantage of quoting and answering each part. > It can be advantageous to swap the order of the quoted messages for a > more logical flow in the reply, and trimming of the quoted text is even > more important in the case of several long messages. Yep, that can be done directly in the text editor... I doubt there is a way to source sorted messages directly from mutt index. It feels not even necessary in the end. On Tue, Nov 08, 2016 at 02:08:55AM +0100, Simon Ruderich wrote: > To answer multiple mails at once tag them (t for a single mail) > and then use ;r to reply to all of them (this will quote all of > them in $EDITOR). Hey Simon, your mail is exactly what saved me. I never noticed the ';' entry in the index help screen, and for one reason or another i had never had the need to operate on tagged messages until tonight, in long time i use mutt. So i was trying replying to multiple messages just tagging them and answering, which of course was not working. > However in the thread view the resulting mail will only appear as > reply to one of those mails (not sure if this is a limitation of > mutt or the in-reply-to header). I dont know whether it's a mutt limitation, but iirc this is the behaviour on other mail clients too. > This fact makes it less useful for mailing lists, as you most likely > want to retain the thread hierarchy for all replies. Yep, this is the aspect that 'worries' me more, and i don't think i would use it much, if at all, in mailing lists... Anyway ok, thread hierarchy will definitely be broken after that, but is there a way to decide which single message you want to actually answer toi, within the thread? Or does mutt sorts tagged ones randomly or with fixed criteria? Now ok, it's very likely that this message will land in the wrong place, but i wanted to try it out :) In any case, mutt always manages to surprise me... I didn't think it was that easy to do what i was looking for. My bad for not knowing the tag-prefix function, i guess most mutt power users use it a lot. If i knew it i would have probably figured out how to solve my issue. Thanks to everyone, and sorry for the long mixed mail :)
