Quoting Selected Text In BeMail

This week a Tip on a regular subject, and what a surprise, it's about BeMail.

When you receive an e-mail message, and you need to reply to it, you frequently want to include a portion of the original message, to show what you're responding to. By convention, that text is "quoted," or denoted to be from the prior message, by prefacing each line with a ">" character. And, conveniently, BeMail will automatically quote the text of the original message when you reply to it (use the keyboard shortcut of Alt-R!).

Sometimes, though, you don't want to include the entirety of the original message, either because it's too long, or not relevant, or whatever. In that case, you find yourself trimming away the quoted text that you don't want to resend (or worse, you leave it, and waste electrons!).

BeMail gives you an easy way to reply only to a specific part of an e-mail message:

1. With the original message open, select the part of the message you want to reply to:

   

   In this case, I don't feel the need to include Scott's signature in my reply, so I'm selecting only the first line.

2. Hit Reply (either via the keyboard or the menu):

   

   A reply message is created in BeMail, with the text you selected included and quoted.

3. Type your message:

   

So there you have it, a simple way to save electrons, because there just aren't enough of them to go around if we waste them.