Re: Change in rmail-reply

[Michael Ekstrand]

Richard M Stallman <address@hidden> writes:
>     If you want to edit the message and Cc the original recipents, then 
>     rmail-reply, adding the extra recipients to the To or Cc would be more 
>     appropriate.
>
> Using reply would be totally inconvenient, since the point is to send the
> same message.

I think, in this case, Forward is actually the appropriate action -- you
can CC the original recipients on the forward to let them know that
forwarding has happened, and the new recipients know the message is
fowarded on from X via Y.

>     Resend should be limited to non-edited messages only - if the message is 
>     edited, then it comes from you, not the original sender.
>
> All else being equal, I agree; but it is hard to let people
> edit the headers without also letting them edit the rest.

I use Gnus rather than Rmail, which has a "resend edited" command, and I
think its presence is odd.  Part of this may be that my introduction to
resend/bounce was in Mutt, where you just had "bounce" which took a mail
address and bounced the current message, unedited, to it.  You could
edit the message in your mailbox and then bounce it, of course, but
there was no "resend edited."

My use cases for resend are the following:

 - Mail comes to the wrong address.  If someone sends a school message
   to my personal mail address, or vice versa, I usually resend it to
   the correct account and reply from there.  I can then request that
   they use the addresses appropriately.

 - Spam slips through my spam filter.  I have a michael+spam mail alias
   whose action is to train SpamAssassin on anything it receives.  If a
   spam shows up in my inbox, then, I can use resend to redirect the
   message, unmodified (save for Resent-*), to the spam training filter.

Both of these cases involve rerouting misdirected e-mails, and require
no editing of the original message.  If I receive a message that I think
is better read by someone else, I use forward.

Thus, I think having "resend" (or "bounce") only able to resend with no
editing is a sane behavior.

- Michael

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