Reply -> Reply To All

Dear Lazyweb,

Have you ever pressed “Reply” to an email, spent ages editing it and then realised you had meant to hit “Reply All”? It means you have to do a new Reply All, and either copy and paste the edited text from the old to the new (which messes up Thunderbird’s special handling of the quoting) or copy and paste all the extra email addresses, one by one, from the new to the old.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Thunderbird extension which put a button on the Reply Compose window which basically did an “Oops, I forgot the other people – please add them now”?

11 thoughts on “Reply -> Reply To All

  1. Yea, I’ve done that. Luckily you can paste a comma separated list into Thunderbird’s address field, rather than pasting them one at a time.

  2. Personally, I’ve just gotten into the habit of hitting ‘Reply To All’ no matter what, and then deciding who I should actually be sending it to.

  3. I’ve gotten into the habit of just hitting “Reply All” no matter what. If I need to, I can always remove a couple addresses, which is easier than adding them.

    Also, not that this will help you much, but Apple’s Mail.app has a button in the compose window that lets you toggle between Reply/Reply All.

  4. GMail lets you click on the “Reply To All” button after you’ve composed the reply to add the missing addresses.

  5. > (which messes up Thunderbird’s special handling of the quoting)
    How about fixing this in Thunderbird?

  6. I personally like the Gmail’s approach, which is “adding content to the thread”. Every time you like, you can change “who should receive this continuation”.

    IMO what makes Gmail a great mail agent, is its view to the content. It doesn’t matter how the current message came here (email, offline im, etc); just read, answer, discuss, etc.

  7. The fact that copying and pasting the edited text from one message to another causes problems is a bug that I would consider much more significant than this particular use-case. There are, for instance, plenty of situations wherein you’ve already *sent* a message to one person, and then want to also send the same message to somebody else, or else you know you want to send to both of them in the first place but want to do it individually (e.g., so they each get only their own address in the To: field).

    Not that an “Oops, I want to send to everyone after all” button would be a bad thing, but I consider it a very minor issue compared to the comparatively much larger problem of breaking copy and paste.

  8. The fact that copying and pasting the edited text from one message to another causes problems is a bug that I would consider much more significant than this particular use-case.

    Unfortunately, I strongly suspect that’s impossible to fix in a plain text representation. You could approximate it by not wrapping lines with a > and wrapping other lines – but it would never be 100%. You can’t transfer the magic blue “this was in the original message” juice without metadata.

    There are, for instance, plenty of situations wherein you’ve already *sent* a message to one person, and then want to also send the same message to somebody else,

    Edit As New (Ctrl-E)? :-)