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2.5.1 Interfacing With a Mailer

When you print from a mailer (or a news reader), your mailer calls a tool, say a2ps on a part of the whole mailbox. This makes it difficult for a2ps to guess that the file is of the type ‘mail’. Therefore, for better results, make sure to tell a2ps the files are mails. The user option ‘mail’ (or ‘longmail’ for longer inputs) encapsulates most typical tuning users want to print mails (for instance, don’t print all the headers).

Most specifically, if your mailer is:

elm ¶

Once you are in elm, hit o to enter in the options edition menu, hit p to edit the printer command, and enter ‘a2ps -=mail %s -d’. The option ‘-d’ means to print on the default printer.

pine ¶

Jan Chrillesen suggests us how to use a2ps with the Pine mail-reader. Add the following to .pinerc (of course you can put it in pine.conf as well):

# Your printer selection
printer=a2ps -=mail -d

# Special print command
personal-print-command=a2ps -=mail -d