Sending Mail

A good way to try exmh is to send a message to yourself. Here are the steps you take to do that:

1. Click the Send button in the message buttons in the bottom group. exmh opens a new window containing the template for your message. The built-in editor, sedit, starts out with the insert cursor positioned at the end of the first empty header line. Enter your user name after the To: field label. If you want to send the message to more than one person, use a comma to separate the names. The Section Addressing Email has more information.
2. Position the insert cursor on the next header field. You can do this a few different ways. The most direct way is to click the first mouse button where you want the cursor to be. There are keyboard shortcuts, too. If you press <Tab>, the editor takes you to the end of the next header field. You can also use the arrow keys or the emacs-like bindings described in the Section Editing Keys to move the cursor.
3. The next field is the Cc: field. People listed in the Cc: field get a "courtesy" (or "carbon") copy of the message. By convention, the message is primarily for the people listed in the To: field, and the people in the Cc: field are getting the message "for information." In this case, you can leave the Cc: field empty.
4. Press <Tab> to move the insert cursor to the Subject: field. Enter a subject. The people who receive your message will get an idea of what the message is about from the subject, so take a moment to think of a good one. For this test, type "exmh test message".
5. Make sure the header fields To: through Subject: are acceptable. In particular, make sure there are no blank lines between any of the header fields. The mail system treats a blank line as meaning "end-of-header," so you don't want to prematurely end the header section. If you have a blank line, position the insert cursor on it and use Backspace to remove the empty line.
6. Position the cursor at the start of the message body. You can use the mouse, or you can press <Tab> twice quickly. When using the default MH message templates, which are shown in the example, exmh places the cursor right after the line of dashes.
7. Type in your message. When you type in a long message, the lines wrap automatically at word boundaries. To get a blank line for paragraph boundaries, press <Return>. Here's where you can see how to cut and paste when editing your message. The built-in editor supports several editing commands based on the GNU Emacs key bindings. If you select the Simple Edit menu entry under the main Bindings menu, you bring up a dialog that lets you view and edit the key bindings. The Section Editing Commands describes this dialog in more detail. The Section Editing Keys gives a complete listing of key bindings.
8. If you are happy with the message, click the Send button at the top-right corner of the window. The Send button turns grey, and the window disappears once the message has been sent succesfully.

   If you don't want to send the message, click the Abort button instead. If you want to save the message draft and continue to work on it later, click the Save&Quit button. Section Using an Existing Message as a Template describes working on a saved draft.

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This file is from the third edition of the book MH & xmh: Email for Users & Programmers, ISBN 1-56592-093-7, by Jerry Peek. Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1995 by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. This file is freely-available; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. For more information, see the file copying.htm.