3.1 Sending Mail

Let’s start our tour by sending ourselves a message which we can later read and process. Enter M-x mh-smail to invoke the MH-E program to send messages. Your message appears in an Emacs buffer whose mode⁵ is MH-Letter.

Enter your login name in the ‘To:’ header field. Press the TAB twice to move the cursor past the ‘Cc:’ field, since no carbon copies are to be sent, and on to the ‘Subject:’ field. Enter Test or anything else that comes to mind.

Press TAB again to move the cursor to the body of the message. Enter some text, using normal Emacs commands. You should now have something like this⁶:

--:--  *scratch*   All L1     (Lisp Interaction)-------------------------
To: wohler
cc:
Subject: Test
X-Mailer: MH-E 8.1; nmh 1.1; GNU Emacs 23.1
--------
This is a test message to get the wheels churning...#


--:**  {draft}   All L5     (MH-Letter)----------------------------------
Type C-c C-c to send message, C-C ? for help

MH-E message composition window

Note the line of dashes that separates the header and the body of the message. It is essential that these dashes (or a blank line) are present or the body of your message will be considered to be part of the header.

There are several commands specific to MH-Letter mode⁷, but at this time we’ll only use C-c C-c to send your message. Type C-c C-c now. That’s all there is to it!