Reply to and Forward Messages

Replying to mail messages (Back to Top)

You can reply to the sender of a message or you can reply to the sender and all recipients of the message.

  • Reply replies only to the sender of the original message. It does not include any other addresses that might be in the To: or Cc: fields. Clicking Reply opens a new mail compose page and populates the To: field with the name of the person who sent you the message.
  • Reply to All includes all recipients from the previous message. You can use this option if you want everyone who saw the previous message to also see your response.

Using Reply only preserves the body text. Attachments from the original message are not included in the reply.

Clicking Reply or Reply to All opens the Compose page, with the text from the old message preserved. Depending on how you set your user preferences, the text from previous messages may have a character showing the number of previous exchanges that have occurred since this text was written. For example if the reply is part of an ongoing conversation, and you have the option Include original message with this prefix... set to use the > character, the text from each part of the exchange is shown with angle brackets:

> Previous message

> > Message before previous message

> > > And so forth

Note: If the message is in a conversation, changing the Subject: line will cause your reply to appear in a new conversation.

To reply to a message:
    1. With the message open, click Reply orclick the arrow to select Reply to All. A new message window is displayed with the addresses in the header and the original message in the body.
    2. Type your reply.

      Note: If you add your signature automatically to your messages, your signature is automatically placed in the message according to the preference you enabled, either at the end of all messages in the compose window or at the end of the message you compose, above the quoted text.

    3. If you want to change which part of the original message should be included in the reply, click Options on the compose toolbar. Your default option is marked but you can change it for this email only.
    4. Click Send.

Forwarding a mail message (Back to Top)

You can use Forward to send a mail message on to someone else. Forwarding a message includes all file attachments, whereas using Reply preserves the body text and does not include the attachments.

To forward a message:
    1. Open the message to be forwarded.
    2. On the toolbar, click . A compose window opens. The text of the forwarded message appears in the body unless you have chosen to forward messages as attachments in the Preferences Mail tab.
    3. Enter addressees in the To:, CC:, or BCC: fields.
    4. Optionally, add a few lines of new text at the top such so that the recipient knows why you decided to forward it.
    5. Click Send.