Google Email – Reply/ Reply All/ Quoted Text

Responding to Emails

Often times you will be replying to an email message that someone else sends you, rather than composing a brand-new message. When you hit reply, the recipient’s email address will automatically appear in the To: field. 

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Additionally, you may receive emails where you’re not the only recipient, and in this instance you’ll need to decide whether you want to reply just to the person who sent the message, or reply to all (the sender and all recipients). For example, if you’re collaborating with a group of people by email, you may want to reply to all so that everyone gets the message. However, if you intend to send a more private message to just the sender, you’ll need to select the reply option so the message stays between the two of you.(Scroll to the bottom of your message to see these additional choices).

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Selecting “Quote” for Reply in Email

If you are like me, sometimes you want to respond to a specific portion of an email, not the entire thing. To do this in Google Apps, you will have to enable one of the common features available in the Labs section of the settings page.

To Enable this Feature:

Click the gear icon in the upper right corner of your Gmail inbox to get to the settings screen. On that screen, click the Labs Tab and scroll down until  you find the entry with the title: Quote selected text, as shown below  Select the Enable button and Save Changes

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Once you have enabled the quote feature, you can use it to limit what you quote in a reply email. For example, take a look at the email below..

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If I reply to this email, it will pull in all contents of the previous email,

But if I only want to quote a portion of this message in my reply email, I can simply highlight that portion and hit “Reply.”

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Now, when I click reply, only the quote is pulled into the reply email, as you can see below: 

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Use the following link to download this handout:Gmail-Reply