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List:       kmail-devel
Subject:    selecting mail for reply
From:       Seth Chaiklin <seth () psy ! au ! dk>
Date:       2001-01-31 15:48:21
[Download RAW message or body]

Greetings,

Some time ago, a message fragment showed up as part of a bug report
I made about a printing problem.  I searched the "bugs" database without
being able to find anymore of the conversation, but I would like to add a 
humble opinion.

The issue is being able to (a) select part of a message with the cursor, and
(b) upon hitting reply, only the selected part of the message gets carried 
over to Composer.

Michael Häckel did not see the need/value of such a feature. Which is fair 
enough.  But maybe he has never had experience with such a feature, so I 
thought I would tell my own experience, which comes from using later versions 
of Pegasus under MS-Windows.  

In Pegasus, when one hits "reply" a dialog box comes up with a number
of checkboxes, where most are in a persistent state.

1.  One section of the dialog is to decide whether one wants to include the 
message in the reply or not.

2.  A second section allows one to toggle the standard "In reply to...." 
message.

3.   A third section allows one to choose which header fields should be used 
to get the address (and where it makes an intelligent guess for you).  When a 
message has a to: from: cc: and Reply-To:, it is nice to be select the 
fields, instead of "reply-all" and then edit.

Finally, if part of a message is selected and one hits "reply", then a dialog 
box asks if it should be the selected part or the whole message (to avoid 
situations where a piece was selected, but not intended).

Is it useful?  Well...I miss it....

1. Many times one gets a message with 20 lines, but wants to respond to only 
3 lines in the middle of the message.  It is a pleasure to be able to select 
those lines (or more precisely, 2 sentences), and then hit reply to only
have that piece of text in the messages immediately available in the message.

2. Sometimes, especially with more personal letters, it is nice to be able to 
toggle off "On September, FirstName LastName, wrote..." 

3. Sometimes one uses old messages as a way to get someone´s address, and one 
uses a reply, so it nice to not have to delete the entire message. Also, as 
things stand now, I could not see any way to configure Kmail to suppress 
including having the entire original message in the reply. 

Anyway.....I was not trying to start a dialogue, or a fight, or make a 
complaint....but now that the freeze seems to have created a little breathing 
room here...and several potential developers have suddenly appeared...I 
thought that I would take a chance and see whether this trial balloon has 
helium or lead. (-:

Cheers,
   Seth

P.S.  The original fragments appears as part of Bug #15922

Bug#15922; Package kmail. Full text available.Message received at 
15922@bugs.kde.org: From: Wolfgang Rohdewald <WRohdewald at dplanet.ch>
 Reply-To: WRohdewald at dplanet.ch
To: kmail at max.tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de,
Subject: Re: Bug#15922: print from the menu bar does not work, while printing 
by the icon in the toolbar does
 Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 21:35:48 +0100

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Monday 27 November 2000 17:54, Michael Häckel wrote:
> > (For example, I am hoping that someday it will be possible to select only
> > a part of the text in a message to be included when the "reply" command
> > is used.)>
> Why? You can delete the text you don't like in the composer.
the other way round is often easier. Eudora could do that, I still often miss 
this


-- 
seth@psy.au.dk
seth@schutz.psy.aau.dk
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