Reading Your Mail
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The mh-e entry point for reading mail is
M-x mh-rmail.
This command incorporates your mail and creates a buffer called
+inbox
in
MH-Folder
mode.
The
M-x mh-rmail
command shows you only new mail, not old mail.
(If you want to see your old mail as well, use
M-r
to pull all your messages into mh-e.
Or, give a prefix argument to
mh-rmail
so it will prompt you for folder to visit like
M-f
(for example,
C-u M-x mh-rmail RET bob RET).
Both
M-r
and
M-f
are described in the Section
Organizing Your Mail with Folders.)
The
+inbox
buffer
contains
scan lines,
which are one-line summaries of each incorporated message.
You can perform most MH commands on these messages via one-letter
commands discussed in this chapter.
See the Section
Find and Specify with scan, pick, Ranges, Sequences
for a description of the contents of the
scan lines, and see the Figure
After incorporating new messages for an example.
Command | Description
_________|__________________________________________
RET | Display a message
SPC | Go to next page in message
DEL | Go to previous page in message
, (comma)| Display a message with all header fields
M-SPC | Go to next message in digest
M-DEL | Go to previous message in digest
M-b | Break up digest into separate messages
n | Display next message
p | Display previous message
g | Go to a message
M-< | Go to first message
M-> | Go to last message
t | Toggle between MH-Folder and "MH-Folder
| Show" modes
_________|__________________________________________
The
RET
command displays the message that the cursor is on.
If the message is already displayed, it scrolls to the
beginning of the message.
Use SPC and DEL to move forwards and backwards one page at a time
through the message.
Both of these commands can be given a prefix argument
that specifies the number of lines to scroll (such as
C-u 10 SPC).
mh-e normally hides a lot of the superfluous header fields that
mailers add to a message, but if you wish to see all of them, use the
,
(comma) command.
Reading Digests
As described in the Section
Creating Digests,
a digest is a message that
contains other messages.
Special mh-e commands let you read digests conveniently.
You can use SPC and DEL to page through the digest as
if it were a normal message, but if you wish to skip to the next
message in the digest, use
M-SPC.
To return to a previous message, use
M-DEL.
Another handy command is
M-b.
This command uses the MH command
burst(1)
described in the Section Bursting Messages to break
out each message in the digest into its own message.
Using this command, you can quickly delete unwanted messages, like
this:
Once the digest is split up, toggle out of
MH-Folder Show
mode with
t
(the Section Moving Around)
so that the scan lines fill the screen and messages aren't displayed.
Then use
d
(the Section Deleting Your Mail)
to quickly delete messages that you don't want to read (based on the
Subject:
header field).
You can also burst the digest to reply directly to the
people who posted the messages in the digest.
One problem you may encounter is that the
From:
header fields are preceded with a
>
so that
your reply can't create the
To:
field correctly.
In this case, you must correct the
To:
field yourself.
This is described later in the Section
Editing Textual Messages.
Reading Multimedia Mail
MH has the ability to read
MIME
(Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) messages.
Unfortunately, mh-e does not yet have this ability, so you have to
use the MH commands
show(1)
or
mhn(1)
from the shell to read MIME messages.
(You can call them directly from Emacs if you're running the X Window
System: type
M-! xterm -e mhn message-number.
You can leave out the
xterm -e
if you use
mhn -list
or
mhn -store.)
To move on to the next message, use the
n
command; use the
p
command to read the previous message.
Both of these commands can be given a prefix argument to specify how
many messages to skip (for example,
C-u 5 n).
You can also move to a specific message with
g.
After typing
g,
Emacs prompts you for the message number.
Finally, you can go to the first or last message with
M-<
and
M->
respectively.
You can also use the Emacs commands
C-p
and
C-n
to move up and down the scan lines in the
MH-Folder
window.
These commands can be used in conjunction with
RET
to look at deleted or refiled messages.
The command
t
switches between
MH-Folder
mode and
MH-Folder Show
mode.
(For you Emacs wizards, this is implemented as an Emacs minor mode.)
MH-Folder
mode turns off the associated show buffer so that you can perform
operations on the messages quickly without reading them.
This is an excellent way to prune out your junk mail or to refile a
group of messages to another folder for later examination.
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