Sending Mail
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You can send a mail message in several ways.
You can call
M-x mh-smail
directly, either within Emacs or from the command line like:
% emacs -f mh-smail
From within mh-e's
MH-Folder
mode, other methods of sending mail are available as well:
Command| Description
_______|___________________________________________
m | Compose a message
r | Reply to a message
f | Forward message(s)
M-d | Redistribute a message
M-e | Edit a message that was bounced by mailer
M-a | Edit a message to send it again
_______|___________________________________________
From within a
MH-Folder
buffer, you can simply use the command
m.
However you do it, you are prompted for the
To:,
cc:,
and
Subject:
header fields.
Once you've specified the recipients and
subject, your message appears in an Emacs buffer whose mode is
MH-Letter
(see the Figure
mh-e message composition window
to see what the buffer looks like).
MH-Letter
mode allows you to edit your message, to check the validity of the
recipients, to insert other messages into your message, and to send
the message.
We'll go more into depth about editing a
draft
(a message you're composing) in just a moment.
(I highly recommend that you use a
draft folder
so that you can edit several drafts in parallel.
The Section Draft Folder
tells how you can create one.)
mh-smail
always creates a two-window layout with the current buffer on top and
the draft on the bottom.
If you would rather preserve the window layout, use
M-x mh-smail-other-window.
To compose a reply to a message, use the
r
command.
If you supply a prefix argument (as in
C-u r),
the message you are replying to is inserted in your reply after having
first been run through
mhl(1)
with the format file
mhl.reply.
The Section mhl
explains how you can modify the default
mhl.reply
file.
When you reply to a message, you are first prompted with
Reply to whom?.
You have several choices here.
Response| Reply Goes To
________|____________________________________________________
from | The person who sent the message. This is the de-
| fault, so RET is sufficient.
________|____________________________________________________
to | Replies to the sender, plus all recipients in the
| To: header field.
________|____________________________________________________
all | Forms a reply to the sender, plus all recipients.
cc |
________|____________________________________________________
Depending on your answer,
repl
is given a different argument to form your reply.
Please see the Section
Replying to Messages: repl for more details.
Specifically, a choice of
from
or none at all runs
repl -nocc all,
and a choice of
to
runs
repl -cc to.
Finally, either
cc
or
all
runs
repl -cc all -nocc me.
Two windows are then created.
One window contains the message to which you are replying.
Your draft, in
MH-Letter
mode (described in the Section
Editing a Draft), is in the other window.
If you wish to customize the header or other parts of the reply
draft, please see the Section
The replcomps File.
To forward a message, use the
f
command.
You are given a draft to edit that looks like it would if you had
run the MH command
forw(1)
(see the Section Forwarding Messages: forw).
You are given a chance to add some text (see the Section
Editing a Draft).
You can forward several messages by using a prefix argument; in this
case, you are prompted for the name of a
sequence,
a symbolic name that represents a list or range of message numbers
(for example,
C-u f forbob RET).
All of the messages in the sequence are inserted into your draft.
By the way, although sequences are often mentioned in this chapter,
you don't have to worry about them for now; the full description of
sequences in mh-e is at the end in the Section
Using Sequences.
The Section More About Sequences
covers sequences in general.
The command
M-d
is similar in function to forwarding mail, but it does not allow you
to edit the message, nor does it add your name to the
From:
header field.
It appears to the recipient as if the message had come from the
original sender.
For more information on redistributing messages,
see the Section Distributing Messages with dist.
Also investigate the
M-a
command in the Section
Editing Old Drafts and Bounced Messages
for another way to redistribute messages.
If you don't complete a draft for one reason or another, and if the draft
buffer is no longer available, you can pick your draft up again with
M-a.
If you don't use a draft folder, your last
draft
file will be used.
If you use draft folders, which I recommend (see the Section
Draft Folder),
you'll need to visit the draft folder with
M-f drafts RET,
use
n
to move to the appropriate message, and then use
M-a
to prepare the message for editing.
The
M-a
command can also be used to take messages that were sent to
you and to send them to more people.
On the other hand, you might have received a message from the
Mailer-Daemon
complaining that your mail wasn't posted for some reason or another.
In this case, use
M-e
to prepare the message for editing.
It does this by removing the
Mailer-Daemon
envelope and unneeded header fields.
Fix whatever addressing problem you had, and send the message
again with
C-c C-c.
|
