R vs. r in Mail (and mailx?) (was Re: withdrawing mails)

[chris at mimsy.UUCP]

>In article <3134 at osu-eddie.UUCP> lien at osu-eddie.UUCP (Yao-Nan Lien) writes:
>>I didn't notice it and used 'r' as usual to reply the mail.

In article <2107 at ptsfa.UUCP> ssl at ptsfa.UUCP (Sam Lok) writes:
>Next time, try 'R' instead of 'r'.  With the current MAIL setup, there
>nothing one can do except to see that it's a good lesson to learn from.  :-)

As distributed with 4BSD, the Mail program (/usr/ucb/[Mm]ail) sends
a copy of a `r'eply to everyone, while a `R'eply goes only to the
sender.  This is arguably wrong (and equally arguably right: but
I will not argue either side here); fortunately, there is a very
easy way to change it on a per-user *and* per-site basis.  If you
would rather have `R' reply to all, and `r' only to the sender, say

	set Replyall

in your .mailrc.  If you wish this to affect everyone on the machine,
put it in /usr/lib/Mail.rc instead.  Those who do not like being
so affected can put

	unset Replyall

in their own .mailrc files.

Alas, if you have a Sun running 3.0 or later, none of this works.
Sun decided that `r'=>all, `R'=>sender was wrong (fine).  To fix
it, Sun should simply have set Replyall in their distributed
/usr/lib/Mail.rc.  Instead, they changed the source (ai!).  This
was a mistake indeed.  Now instead of a Replyall variable, they
have a replyall variable.  If replyall is not set, one gets
`r'=>sender, `R'=>all.  To get predictable behaviour no matter
where you are, one command no longer suffices:

	# If you like `r'=>sender, `R'=>all
	set Replyall
	unset replyall

	# but if you like `r'=>all, `R'=>sender
	unset Replyall
	set replyall
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7690)
UUCP:	seismo!mimsy!chris	ARPA/CSNet:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu