RMAIL's "rmail-reply" defaults

When emacs 19.28 was initially released, the default for the "r" command in RMAIL changed from reply from just sender to reply to all recipients. Since this change introduced the risk of embarassment (or worse!) at the possibility of someone sending confidential comments to the sender of the message and having those comments instead be directed to all recipients, much clamor ensued and there was a demand for a return of the old default. The old behavior was then made the default, under the control of the variable RU-just-sender. The variable defaults to t, and the new behavior (of rmail-reply replying to all recipients can be had by setting that variable to nil:

    (setq RU-just-sender nil)

But during the discussion, there were some of the opinion that, now that people might be using emacs in a non-Rutgers environment, making the Rutgers version behave differently, or giving a Rutgers-specific way to change the default might be leaving our users open for the same problem when working on machines outside of Rutgers. So, on or about February 27, 1995, "r" will again default to reply to all recipients!

Therefore, here is the code for your .emacs file to change the default in a non-Rutgers environment:

   ;;; Change the behaviour of "reply" in Rmail to only reply to the sender
   ;;; instead of the sender and all other recipients.
   (defun rmail-reply-just-sender (everyone)
     "Reply to the current message.
   Reply just to the sender, prefix argument means to include all other
   recipients. 
   While composing the reply, use \\[mail-yank-original] to yank the
   original message into it."
     (interactive "P")
     (if everyone
         (rmail-reply nil)
       (rmail-reply 1)))
   (setq rmail-mode-hook
         '(lambda () (define-key rmail-mode-map "r" 'rmail-reply-just-sender)))

What this does is switch whatever the default currently is. Until the new emacs comes out (scheduled for February 27, 1995), you should also specify

    (setq RU-just-sender nil)

to turn off the current change in default. After that emacs comes out, the above line will have no effect, and can be removed.

The recommended code for making this change in a Rutgers-specific way is:

  (add-hook 'rmail-mode-hook 'rmail-setup-reply-just-sender)
  (defun rmail-setup-reply-just-sender ()
    (interactive)
    (load "rmail-ru")
    (define-key rmail-mode-map "r"      'rmail-reply-just-sender))

You should also load rmail-ru" if you want to use any of the following local functions:

  rmail-summary-by-senders
  rmail-summary-by-subject
  rmail-summary-by-date
  rmail-summary-by-to
  rmail-multiple-output-to-rmail-file
  rmail-multiple-delete-forward

This page last updated February 27, 1995.