Swap "Reply All" To/CC recipients in Mail? "Followup" button?

Question

Many many times when I need to follow up on a multi-recipient email message, I find myself choosing "Reply All" and then manually swapping the contents of the To and CC recipient fields. The problem is that if I "Reply All" to something that I previously sent, the new message will have me listed in the To field, and everyone else in the CC field. While I could just send the messages like that, some people don't read carefully if they see they were only CC'd on a message. In many circumstances I want people to know that the follow-up was directed to them. I want the mail to be To them (again) and CC'd to me. To achieve that I now have to "Reply All", then "Select All" in each recipient field, and either drag to the other field w/ the mouse, or do a Copy/Paste, or some combination. I find myself doing that a lot.
My Mail app fantasy (feature request) would be a "Followup" button that acts like "Reply All" except that it keeps the recipient fields the same as they were in the original mail.
Short of this fantasy being realized, it would at least be nice to be able to hit "Reply All" and then select "Swap To/CC Recipients" (or some such) from an Applescript menu. I have tried (for years...) to write such a script, but there are some apparent bugs in Mail's Applescript interface that make it impossible to grab/set recipients in a "Reply All" message. OS release after OS release, this has not been fixed, and I cannot find an example of anyone doing it.
Does anyone know of a solution or work-around? Can anyone demonstrate an Applescript that would swap the To/CC recipient contents in a "Reply All" message? Can't do it (that I can see) in Automator. Perhaps some keyboard macro software (e.g., QuicKeys X).
Thanks in advance....
Prof. Greg Welch
Computer Science
UNC-Chapel Hill
Dual G5 minitower, iMac G5, 17" PowerBook   Mac OS X (10.4.4)  

Answer 1

Hello pefrat,
Welcome to the Apple Support Communities! I understand that when you “Reply All” to a message the additional recipients are moved to the "CC:" field. This is expected behavior in iOS as well as OS X Mail. Is there a reason you would rather have the recipients in the “To:” field as opposed to the “CC:” field?
If you want to manually move the recipient address from the "CC:" field to the "To:" field, you can absolutely do so. Just keep in mind that the end result is the same:
Write messages - iPhone
http://help.apple.com/iphone/8/#/iph3caef30a
Change a recipient from Cc to Bcc. After you enter recipients, you can drag them from one field to another or change their order.
(This applies to the “To:” field as well)
Cheers,
Matt M.