36.4.4 Mail Mode Miscellany
- C-c C-t
- Move to the beginning of the message body text (
mail-text
).
- C-c C-w
- Insert the file ~/.signature at the end of the message text
(
mail-signature
).
- C-c C-i file <RET>
- Insert the contents of file at the end of the outgoing message
(
mail-attach-file
).
- M-x ispell-message
- Perform spelling correction on the message text, but not on citations from
other messages.
C-c C-t (mail-text
) moves point to just after the header
separator line—that is, to the beginning of the message body text.
C-c C-w (mail-signature
) adds a standard piece of text at
the end of the message to say more about who you are. The text comes
from the file ~/.signature in your home directory. To insert
your signature automatically, set the variable mail-signature
to
t
; after that, starting a mail message automatically inserts the
contents of your ~/.signature file. If you want to omit your
signature from a particular message, delete it from the buffer before
you send the message.
You can also set mail-signature
to a string; then that string
is inserted automatically as your signature when you start editing a
message to send. If you set it to some other Lisp expression, the
expression is evaluated each time, and its value (which should be a
string) specifies the signature.
You can do spelling correction on the message text you have written
with the command M-x ispell-message. If you have yanked an
incoming message into the outgoing draft, this command skips what was
yanked, but it checks the text that you yourself inserted. (It looks
for indentation or mail-yank-prefix
to distinguish the cited
lines from your input.) See Spelling.
To include a file in the outgoing message, you can use C-x i,
the usual command to insert a file in the current buffer. But it is
often more convenient to use a special command, C-c C-i
(mail-attach-file
). This command inserts the file contents at
the end of the buffer, after your signature if any, with a delimiter
line that includes the file name. Note that this is not a MIME
attachment.
Turning on Mail mode (which C-x m does automatically) runs the
normal hooks text-mode-hook
and mail-mode-hook
.
Initializing a new outgoing message runs the normal hook
mail-setup-hook
; if you want to add special fields to your mail
header or make other changes to the appearance of the mail buffer, use
that hook. See Hooks.
The main difference between these hooks is just when they are
invoked. Whenever you type M-x mail, mail-mode-hook
runs
as soon as the ‘*mail*’ buffer is created. Then the
mail-setup
function inserts the default contents of the buffer.
After these default contents are inserted, mail-setup-hook
runs.