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### 8.2 Replying to Mail

To compose a reply to a message, use the `r` (`mh-reply`) command.

When you reply to a message, you are first prompted with ‘`Reply to whom?`’. You have several choices here.

> Response | Reply Goes To
> `from` | The person who sent the message. This is the default, so <RET> is sufficient.
> `to` | Replies to the sender, plus all recipients in the ‘`To:`’ header field.
> `cc` `all` | Forms a reply to the addresses in the ‘`Mail-Followup-To:`’ header field if one exists; otherwise forms a reply to the sender, plus all recipients.

Depending on your answer, `repl` 1 is given a different argument to form your reply. Specifically, a choice of `from` or none at all runs ‘`repl -nocc all`’, and a choice of `to` runs ‘`repl -cc to`’. Finally, either `cc` or `all` runs ‘`repl -cc all -nocc me`’. If you find that most of the time you specify one of these choices when you reply to a message, you can change the option `mh-reply-default-reply-to` from its default value of ‘`Prompt`’ to one of the choices listed above. You can always edit the recipients in the draft.

Two windows are then created. One window contains the message to which you are replying in an MH-Show buffer. Your draft, in MH-Letter mode (see Editing Drafts), is in the other window. If the reply draft was not one that you expected, check the things that affect the behavior of `repl` which include the ‘`repl:`’ profile component and the `replcomps` and `replgroupcomps` files.

If you supply a prefix argument (as in `C-u r`), the message you are replying to is inserted in your reply after having first been run through `mhl` with the format file `mhl.reply`. See `mhl`(1) or the section Using mhl in the MH book to see how you can modify the default `mhl.reply` file.

Alternatively, you can customize the option `mh-yank-behavior` and choose one of its ‘`Automatically`’ variants to do the same thing. See Inserting Letter. If you do so, the prefix argument has no effect.

Another way to include the message automatically in your draft is to use ‘`repl: -filter repl.filter`’ in your MH profile.

If you include the message automatically, you can hide the MH-Show buffer by turning off the option `mh-reply-show-message-flag`.

If you wish to customize the header or other parts of the reply draft, please see `repl`(1) and `mh-format`(5).

#### Footnotes

[1] See the section Replying to Messages: repl in the MH book.