Learning GNU Emacs, Second Edition

Chapter 7. Email and Usenet News

In Chapter 5, we discussed how to work with files and interact with the operating system while in Emacs. This chapter adds two more tools to the Emacs work environment: email and news. You can use Emacs as a mail system and a newsreader. You may already have an email system or a newsreader you are familiar with. If this is the case, you don’t need to learn to use the Emacs versions of these applications. If you haven’t fully exploited the capabilities of your email system and newsreader and want to do most of your work from within Emacs, you may want to learn the applications we describe in this chapter.

Working with Mail

This section discusses Emacs’ basic commands for sending mail and its primary mail reader, RMAIL. There are other mail systems available within Emacs, such as MH and vm, which we don’t describe here. The MH mail system has an interface to Emacs called mh-e; for more information, see O’Reilly & Associates’ MH & xmh: Email for Users and Programmers by Jerry Peek. Among other features, mh-e includes MIME support, allowing pictures, programs, sound, and other objects to be attached to a mail message. RMAIL does not have these features yet.

In the following sections, we’ll talk about sending mail to people, but remember that you have to type in real email addresses in order to have the mail delivered to the right person. If you regularly send email to people who have complicated email addresses, read Section 6.2.8 later in this chapter ...