17 Mail

This section applies to Unix and VMS systems only. On these systems, it is possible to compose and send mail directly using jed. This assumes that the Unix system has /usr/ucb/mail. It is trivial to modify mail.sl to support another Unix mailer. For VMS, jed uses the callable mail interface present on VMS versions 5.0 and later.

The default binding for the mail is Ctrl-X m. Alternatively, one may press Esc X and enter mail at the M-x prompt. The mail function will cause a window to open with a buffer called *mail* which contains the three lines:

      To: 
      Subject: 
      ---text follows this line---

Simply enter the email address of the person that you want to send the mail to on the line containing To: and put the subject of the message on the next line labeled Subject:. The text that you wish to mail follows the line labeled ---text follows this line--- which is used by jed as a marker. After you have composed the mail message, press Esc X and enter send at the M-x prompt. For example, the following is an email requesting to be put on the jed mailing list:

      To: jed@jedsoft.org
      Subject: jed mailing list
      ---text follows this line---
      Hi,
      
         Please add me to the JED mailing list so that I may be notified
      of upcoming releases of JED.

      --Maria

For VMS systems, the above example will probably fail because an internet address has been used for the example. For systems using a TCP/IP package, it may be necessary to change jed@jedsoft.org to something like smtp%"jed@jedsoft.org".

The mail function looks for a user defined hook called mail_hook and execute it if it exists. This hook may be used to bind certain keys in the keymap associated with the *mail* buffer. For example,

      define mail_hook ()
      {
        local_unsetkey ("^C");
        local_setkey ("send", "^C^C");
      }

defines the key Ctrl-C Ctrl-C in the mail keymap to perform the send function. Other possibilities include binding a key sequence, say Ctrl-C Ctrl-W, to a function that inserts the contents of a signature file.