The MH-E Manual
-->This is version 8.6 of The MH-E Manual, last updated 2016-04-29.
Copyright © 1995, 2001–2003, 2005–2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of either:
- the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with the Front-Cover Texts being “A GNU Manual,” and with the Back-Cover Texts as in (a) below. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License.”
(a) The FSF’s Back-Cover Text is: “You have the freedom to copy and modify this GNU manual.”
- the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option) any later version. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU General Public License.”
Table of Contents
- Preface
- 1 GNU Emacs Terms and Conventions
- 2 Getting Started
- 3 Tour Through MH-E
- 4 Using This Manual
- 5 Incorporating Your Mail
- 6 Reading Your Mail
- 7 Organizing Your Mail with Folders
- 8 Sending Mail
- 9 Editing a Draft
- 10 Aliases
- 11 Identities
- 12 The Speedbar
- 13 The Menu Bar
- 14 The Tool Bar
- 15 Searching Through Messages
- 16 Viewing Message Threads
- 17 Limiting Display
- 18 Using Sequences
- 19 Dealing With Junk Mail
- 20 Miscellaneous Commands, Variables, and Buffers
- Appendix A Scan Line Formats
- Appendix B Reading Mailing Lists Effectively
- Appendix C Odds and Ends
- Appendix D History of MH-E
- Appendix E GNU Free Documentation License
- Appendix F GNU General Public License
- Key (Character) Index
- Command Index
- Option (Variable) Index
- Concept Index
Next: GNU Emacs Terms and Conventions, Previous: The MH-E Manual, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
Preface
This manual introduces another interface to the MH mail system that is accessible through the GNU Emacs editor, namely, MH-E. MH-E is easy to use. I don’t assume that you know GNU Emacs or even MH at this point, since I didn’t know either of them when I discovered MH-E. However, MH-E was the tip of the iceberg, and I discovered more and more niceties about GNU Emacs and MH. Now I’m fully hooked on both of them.
The MH-E package is distributed with Emacs1, so you shouldn’t have to do anything special to use it. Gnus is also required; it is bundled with Emacs. This manual covers MH-E version 8.6. To help you decide which version you have, see Getting Started.
If you don’t already use GNU Emacs but want to learn more, you can
read a built-in tutorial by starting GNU Emacs and typing C-h t
(help-with-tutorial). (To learn about this notation, see
GNU Emacs Terms and Conventions.) If you want to take the plunge, consult the
GNU Emacs Manual,
from the Free Software Foundation.
If more information is needed, you can go to the Unix manual pages of the individual MH commands. When the name is not obvious, I’ll guide you to a relevant MH manual page that describes the action more fully.
This manual is available in both Info and online formats. The Info
version is distributed with Emacs and can be accessed with the
info command (‘info mh-e’) or within Emacs (C-h i
m mh-e RET). The online version is available at
SourceForge. Another great
online resource is the book
MH & nmh: Email for
Users & Programmers (also known as the MH book).
I hope you enjoy this manual! If you have any comments, or suggestions for this document, please let me know.
Bill Wohler <wohler at newt.com>
8 February 1995
24 February 2006
Next: Getting Started, Previous: Preface, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
1 GNU Emacs Terms and Conventions
If you’re an experienced Emacs user, you can skip the following conventions and definition of terms and go directly to the next section (see Getting Started).
In general, functions in this text refer to Emacs Lisp functions
that one would call from within Emacs Lisp programs (for example,
(mh-inc-folder)). On the other hand, commands are those
things that are run by the user, such as i or M-x
mh-inc-folder. Programs outside of Emacs are specifically called MH
commands, shell commands, or Unix commands.
The conventions for key names are as follows:
- C-x
Hold down the CTRL (Control) key and press the x key.
- M-x
Hold down the META or ALT key and press the x key.
Since some keyboards don’t have a META key, you can generate M-x, for example, by pressing ESC (Escape), releasing it, and then pressing the x key.
- RET
Press the RETURN or ENTER key. This is normally used to complete a command.
- SPC
Press the space bar.
- TAB
Press the TAB key.
- DEL
Press the DELETE key.
- BS
Press the BACKSPACE key.
A prefix argument allows you to pass an argument to any Emacs function. To pass an argument, type C-u before the Emacs command or keystroke. Numeric arguments can be passed as well. For example, to insert five f’s, use C-u 5 f. There is a default of four when using C-u, and you can use multiple prefix arguments to provide arguments of powers of four. To continue our example, you could insert four f’s with C-u f, 16 f’s with C-u C-u f, 64 f’s with C-u C-u C-u f, and so on. Numeric and valueless negative arguments can also be inserted with the META key. Examples include M-5 to specify an argument of 5, or M-- which specifies a negative argument with no particular value.
The prefix C-u or M- is not necessary in MH-E’s MH-Folder mode (see Receiving Mail). In this mode, simply enter the numerical argument before entering the command.
Emacs uses variables to hold values. These can be changed via
calls to the function setq in ~/.emacs.
Variables in MH-E that are normally modified by the user are called options and are modified through the customize functions (such as M-x customize-option or M-x customize-group). See section Easy Customization in The GNU Emacs Manual. See Options.
You can specify various styles for displaying text using faces. MH-E provides a set of faces that you can use to personalize the look of your MH-E buffers. Use the command M-x customize-face to do this. See section Face Customization in The GNU Emacs Manual.
Commands often offer hooks which enable you to extend or modify
the way a command works.
See section
Hooks in The GNU Emacs Manual
for a description about normal hooks and abnormal hooks.
MH-E uses normal hooks in nearly all cases, so you can assume that we
are talking about normal hooks unless we explicitly mention that a
hook is abnormal. We also follow the conventions described in that
section: the name of the abnormal hooks end in -functions and all
the rest of the MH-E hooks end in -hook. You can add hooks with
either customize-option or add-hook.
There are several other terms that are used in Emacs that you should know. The point is where the cursor currently is. You can save your current place in the file by setting a mark. This operation is useful in several ways. The mark can be later used when defining a region, which is the text between the point and mark. Many commands operate on regions, such as those for deleting text or filling paragraphs. A mark can be set with C-@ (or C-SPC).
The minibuffer is the bottom line of the Emacs window, where all prompting and multiple-character input is directed. You can use completion to enter values such as folders. Completion means that Emacs fills in text for you when you type SPC or TAB. A second SPC or TAB will list all possibilities at that point. See the section Completion in The GNU Emacs Manual. Note that SPC cannot be used for completing filenames and folders.
The minibuffer is also where you enter Emacs function names after
typing M-x. For example, in the preface, I mentioned that you
could obtain help with C-h t (help-with-tutorial). What
this means is that you can get a tutorial by typing either C-h t
or M-x help-with-tutorial. In the latter case, you are prompted
for ‘help-with-tutorial’ in the minibuffer after typing
M-x.
The ‘~’ notation in filenames represents your home directory.
This notation is used by many shells including bash,
tcsh, and csh. It is analogous to the environment
variable ‘$HOME’. For example, ~/.emacs can be written
$HOME/.emacs or using the absolute path as in
/home/wohler/.emacs instead.
In case of trouble: Emacs can be interrupted at any time with C-g. For example, if you’ve started a command that requests that you enter something in the minibuffer, but then you change your mind, type C-g and you’ll be back where you started. If you want to exit Emacs entirely, use C-x C-c.
Next: Tour Through MH-E, Previous: GNU Emacs Terms and Conventions, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
2 Getting Started
Because there are many old versions of MH-E out there, it is important to know which version you have. I’ll be talking about Version 8 which is pretty close to Version 6 and Version 7. It differs from Version 4 and Version 5 and is vastly different from Version 3. See History of MH-E.
To determine which version of MH-E that you have, enter M-x mh-version RET. Hopefully it says that you’re running Version 8.6 which is the latest version as of this printing.
If your version is much older than this, please consider upgrading. You can have your system administrator upgrade the system-wide version, or you can install your own personal version. It’s really quite easy. See Getting MH-E, for instructions for getting and installing MH-E.
If the mh-version command displays ‘No MH variant
detected’2, then you need
to install MH or tell MH-E where to find MH.
If you don’t have MH on your system already, you must install a variant of MH. The Debian mh-e package does this for you automatically (see Getting MH-E). Most people use nmh, but you may be interested in trying out GNU mailutils MH, which supports IMAP. Your GNU/Linux distribution probably has packages for both of these.
If you’ve never run MH before, you need to run install-mh
from the shell before you continue. This sets up your personal MH
environment3. If you don’t, you’ll be greeted with the error message:
‘Install MH and run install-mh before running MH-E’. This is all
you need to know about MH to use MH-E, but the more you know about MH,
the more you can leverage its power. See the
MH book to learn more about MH.
Your MH environment includes your MH profile which is found in the file ~/.mh_profile, or the file named in the environment variable ‘$MH’. This file contains a number of MH profile components. For example, the ‘Path:’ MH profile component contains the path to your mail directory, which is ~/Mail by default.
There are several options MH-E uses to interact with your MH
installation. The option mh-variant specifies the variant used
by MH-E (see Options). The default setting of this option is
‘Auto-detect’ which means that MH-E will automatically choose the
first of nmh, MH, or GNU mailutils MH that it finds in the directories
listed in mh-path (which you can customize),
mh-sys-path, and exec-path. If MH-E can’t find MH at
all, you may have to customize mh-path and add the directory in
which the command mhparam is located. If, on the other hand,
you have both nmh and GNU mailutils MH installed (for example) and
mh-variant-in-use was initialized to nmh but you want to use
GNU mailutils MH, then you can set mh-variant to
‘gnu-mh’.
When mh-variant is changed, MH-E resets mh-progs,
mh-lib, mh-lib-progs, mh-flists-present-flag, and
mh-variant-in-use accordingly.
Prior to version 8, it was often necessary to set some of these variables in ~/.emacs; now it is no longer necessary and can actually cause problems.
In addition to setting variables that point to MH itself, MH-E also
sets a handful of variables that point to where you keep your mail.
During initialization, the function mh-find-path sets
mh-user-path from your ‘Path:’ MH profile component (but
defaults to ‘Mail’ if one isn’t present), mh-draft-folder
from ‘Draft-Folder:’, mh-unseen-seq from
‘Unseen-Sequence:’, mh-previous-seq from
‘Previous-Sequence:’, and mh-inbox from ‘Inbox:’
(defaults to ‘+inbox’). The hook mh-find-path-hook is run
after these variables have been set. This hook can be used the change
the value of these variables if you need to run with different values
between MH and MH-E.
Next: Using This Manual, Previous: Getting Started, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
3 Tour Through MH-E
This chapter introduces some of the terms you’ll need to know and then takes you on a tour of MH-E4. When you’re done, you’ll be able to send, read, and file mail, which is all that a lot of people ever do. But if you’re the curious or adventurous type, read the rest of the manual to be able to use all the features of MH-E. I suggest you read this chapter first to get the big picture, and then you can read the manual as you wish.
Next: Receiving Mail, Up: Tour Through MH-E [Contents][Index]
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!
Next: Processing Mail, Previous: Sending Mail, Up: Tour Through MH-E [Contents][Index]
3.2 Receiving Mail
To read the mail you’ve just sent yourself, enter M-x mh-rmail.
This incorporates the new mail and puts the output from
inc8 (called scan lines after the MH program
scan9 which prints a one-line
summary of each message) into a buffer called ‘+inbox’ whose
major mode is MH-Folder.
The M-x mh-rmail command will show you only new mail, not mail you have already read. If you were to run this tour again, you would use F r to pull all your messages into MH-E.
You should see the scan line for your message, and perhaps others. Use n or p to move the cursor to your test message and type RET to read your message. You should see something like:
3 t08/24 root received fax files on Wed Aug 24 11:00:13 PDT 1
# 4+t08/24 To:wohler Test<<This is a test message to get the wheels
-:%% {+inbox/select} 4 msgs (1-4) Bot L4 (MH-Folder Show)---------
To: wohler
Subject: Test
X-Mailer: MH-E 8.1; nmh 1.1; GNU Emacs 23.1
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 10:49:11 -0800
From: Bill Wohler <wohler@stop.mail-abuse.org>
This is a test message to get the wheels churning...
--:-- {show-+inbox} 4 All L1 (MH-Show)----------------------------
|
After incorporating new messages
If you typed a long message, you can view subsequent pages with SPC and previous pages with DEL.
Next: Leaving MH-E, Previous: Receiving Mail, Up: Tour Through MH-E [Contents][Index]
3.3 Processing Mail
The first thing we want to do is reply to the message that we sent ourselves. Ensure that the cursor is still on the same line as your test message and type r. You are prompted in the minibuffer with ‘Reply to whom:’. Here MH-E is asking whether you’d like to reply to the original sender only, to the sender and primary recipients, or to the sender and all recipients. You can press TAB to see these choices. If you simply press RET, you’ll reply only to the sender. Press RET now.
You’ll find yourself in an Emacs buffer similar to that when you were sending the original message, like this:
To:
cc:
Subject: Re: Test
In-Reply-To: <31054.1142621351@stop.mail-abuse.org>
References: <31054.1142621351@stop.mail-abuse.org>
Comments: In-Reply-To Bill Wohler <wohler@stop.mail-abuse.org>
message dated "Fri, 17 Mar 2006 10:49:11 -0800."
X-Mailer: MH-E 8.1; nmh 1.1; GNU Emacs 23.1
--------
#
--:-- {draft} All L10 (MH-Letter)----------------------------------
To: wohler
Subject: Test
X-Mailer: MH-E 8.1; nmh 1.1; GNU Emacs 23.1
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 10:49:11 -0800
From: Bill Wohler <wohler@stop.mail-abuse.org>
This is a test message to get the wheels churning...
--:-- {show-+inbox} 4 All L1 (MH-Show)----------------------------
Type C-c C-c to send message, C-c ? for help
|
Composition window during reply
By default, MH will not add you to the address list of your replies,
so if you find that the ‘To:’ header field is missing, don’t
worry. In this case, type C-c C-f C-t to create and go to the
‘To:’ field, where you can type your login name again. You can
move around with the arrow keys or with C-p
(previous-line), C-n (next-line), C-b
(backward-char), and C-f (forward-char) and can
delete the previous character with BS. When you’re finished
editing your message, send it with C-c C-c as before.
You’ll often want to save messages that were sent to you in an
organized fashion. This is done with folders. You can use
folders to keep messages from your friends, or messages related to a
particular topic. With your cursor in the MH-Folder buffer and
positioned on the message you sent to yourself, type o to output
(refile in MH parlance) that message to a folder. Enter
test at the ‘Destination folder:’ prompt and type y
(or SPC) when MH-E asks to create the folder ‘+test’. Note
that a ‘^’ (caret) appears next to the message number, which
means that the message has been marked for refiling but has not yet
been refiled. We’ll talk about how the refile is actually carried out
in a moment.
Your previous reply is now waiting in the system mailbox. You incorporate this mail into your MH-Folder buffer named ‘+inbox’ with the i command. Do this now. After the mail is incorporated, use n or p to move the cursor to the new message, and read it with RET. Let’s delete this message by typing d. Note that a ‘D’ appears next to the message number. This means that the message is marked for deletion but is not yet deleted. To perform the deletion (and the refile we did previously), use the x command.
If you want to send another message you can use m instead of M-x mh-smail. So go ahead, send some mail to your friends!
You can get a quick reminder about these commands by typing ?.
This lists several prefix characters. To list the commands
available via the prefix characters, type the prefix character
followed by a ?, for example, F ?. More complete help is
available with the C-h m (describe-mode) command.
Next: More About MH-E, Previous: Processing Mail, Up: Tour Through MH-E [Contents][Index]
3.4 Leaving MH-E
You may now wish to exit emacs entirely. Use C-x C-c
to exit emacs. If you exited without running x in the
‘+inbox’ buffer, Emacs will offer to save it for you. Type
y or SPC to save ‘+inbox’ changes, which means to
perform any refiles and deletes that you did there.
If you don’t want to leave Emacs, you can type q to bury (hide) the MH-E folder or delete it entirely with C-x k. You can then later recall it with C-x b or M-x mh-rmail.
On the other hand, if you no longer want to use MH and MH-E, you can
take your mail with you. You can copy all of your mail into a single
file, mbox-style, by using the MH command packf. For
example, to create a file called msgbox with the messages in
your ‘+inbox’ folder, use ‘packf +inbox’. The
packf command will append the messages to the file if it
already exists, so you can use ‘folders -recurse -fast’ in a
script to copy all of your messages into a single file, or using the
‘-file’ argument, a file for each folder.
Previous: Leaving MH-E, Up: Tour Through MH-E [Contents][Index]
3.5 More About MH-E
These are the basic commands to get you going, but there are plenty more. If you think that MH-E is for you, read the rest of the manual to find out how you can:
| Response | Reply Goes To |
| from | The person who sent the message. This is the default, so RET is sufficient. |
| to | Replies to the sender, plus all recipients in the ‘To:’ header field. |
| cc all | Forms a reply to the addresses in the ‘Mail-Followup-To:’ header field if one exists; otherwise forms a reply to the sender, plus all recipients. |
Depending on your answer, repl31 is given a different argument to form your reply.
Specifically, a choice of from or none at all runs ‘repl
-nocc all’, and a choice of to runs ‘repl -cc to’. Finally,
either cc or all runs ‘repl -cc all -nocc me’. If you
find that most of the time you specify one of these choices when you
reply to a message, you can change the option
mh-reply-default-reply-to from its default value of
‘Prompt’ to one of the choices listed above. You can always edit
the recipients in the draft.
Two windows are then created. One window contains the message to which
you are replying in an MH-Show buffer. Your draft, in MH-Letter mode
(see Editing a Draft), is in the other window. If the reply draft
was not one that you expected, check the things that affect the
behavior of repl which include the ‘repl:’ profile
component and the replcomps and replgroupcomps files.
If you supply a prefix argument (as in C-u r), the message you
are replying to is inserted in your reply after having first been run
through mhl with the format file mhl.reply. See
mhl(1) or the section
Using mhl in the MH
book to see how you can modify the default mhl.reply file.
Alternatively, you can customize the option mh-yank-behavior
and choose one of its ‘Automatically’ variants to do the same
thing. See Inserting Letter to Which You’re Replying. If you do so, the prefix argument has
no effect.
Another way to include the message automatically in your draft is to use ‘repl: -filter repl.filter’ in your MH profile.
If you include the message automatically, you can hide the MH-Show
buffer by turning off the option mh-reply-show-message-flag.
If you wish to customize the header or other parts of the reply draft,
please see repl(1) and mh-format(5).
Next: Redistributing Your Mail, Previous: Replying to Mail, Up: Sending Mail [Contents][Index]
8.3 Forwarding Mail
To forward a message, use the f (mh-forward) command. You
are prompted for the ‘To:’ and ‘cc:’ recipients. You are
given a draft to edit that looks like it would if you had run the MH
command forw32. You can then add some text (see Editing a Draft).
You can forward several messages by using a range (see Ranges).
All of the messages in the range are inserted into your draft. The
hook mh-forward-hook is called on the draft.
By default, the option mh-compose-forward-as-mime-flag is on
which means that the forwarded messages are included as attachments.
These are inline attachments so the forwarded message should appear in
the body of your recipient’s mail program. If you would prefer to
forward your messages verbatim (as text, inline), then turn off this
option. Forwarding messages verbatim works well for short, textual
messages, but your recipient won’t be able to view any non-textual
attachments that were in the forwarded message. Be aware that if you
have ‘forw: -mime’ in your MH profile, then forwarded messages
will always be included as attachments regardless of the settings of
mh-compose-forward-as-mime-flag.
The format of the ‘Subject:’ header field for forwarded messages
is controlled by the option mh-forward-subject-format. This
option is a string which includes two escapes (‘%s’). The first
‘%s’ is replaced with the sender of the original message, and the
second one is replaced with the original ‘Subject:’. The default
value of "%s: %s" takes a message with the header:
To: Bill Wohler <wohler@stop.mail-abuse.org> Subject: Re: 49er football From: Greg DesBrisay <gd@stop.mail-abuse.org>
and creates a subject header field of:
Subject: Greg DesBrisay: Re: 49er football
Next: Editing Old Drafts and Bounced Messages, Previous: Forwarding Mail, Up: Sending Mail [Contents][Index]
8.4 Redistributing Your Mail
The command M-d (mh-redistribute) is similar in function
to forwarding mail, but it does not allow you to edit the message, nor
does it add your name to the ‘From:’ header field. It appears to
the recipient as if the message had come from the original sender.
When you run this command, you are prompted for the recipients.
For more information on redistributing messages, see
dist(1). Also investigate the command e
(mh-edit-again) for another way to redistribute messages
(see Editing Old Drafts and Bounced Messages).
The option mh-redist-full-contents-flag must be turned on if
dist33 requires the whole letter for redistribution,
which is the case if send34 is compiled with the BERK option (which many
people abhor). If you find that MH will not allow you to redistribute
a message that has been redistributed before, turn off this option.
The hook mh-annotate-msg-hook is run after annotating the
message and scan line (see Sending Mail).
Previous: Redistributing Your Mail, Up: Sending Mail [Contents][Index]
8.5 Editing Old Drafts and Bounced Messages
If you don’t complete a draft for one reason or another, and if the
draft buffer is no longer available, you can pick your draft up again
with e (mh-edit-again). If you don’t use a draft
folder, your last draft file will be used. If you use draft
folders, you’ll need to visit the draft folder with F v drafts
RET, use n to move to the appropriate message, and then
use e to prepare the message for editing.
The e command can also be used to take messages that were sent to you and to send them to more people.
Don’t use e to re-edit a message from a Mailer-Daemon who
complained that your mail wasn’t posted for some reason or another. In
this case, use E (mh-extract-rejected-mail) to prepare
the message for editing by removing the Mailer-Daemon envelope and
unneeded header fields. Fix whatever addressing problem you had, and
send the message again with C-c C-c.
Next: Aliases, Previous: Sending Mail, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
9 Editing a Draft
When you edit a message that you want to send (called a draft in this case), the mode used is MH-Letter. This mode provides several commands in addition to the normal Emacs editing commands to help you edit your draft. These can also be found in the ‘Letter’ menu.
- SPC
Perform completion or insert space (
mh-letter-complete-or-space).- M-TAB
Perform completion on header field or word preceding point (
mh-letter-complete).- , (comma)
Flash alias expansion (
mh-letter-confirm-address).- TAB
Cycle to next field (
mh-letter-next-header-field-or-indent).- S-TAB
Cycle to the previous header field (
mh-letter-previous-header-field).- C-c ?
Display cheat sheet for the MH-E commands (
mh-help).- C-c C-c
Save draft and send message (
mh-send-letter).- C-c C-d
Insert fields specified by the given identity (
mh-insert-identity). See Identities.- C-c C-e
Compose MIME message from MH-style directives (
mh-mh-to-mime).- C-c C-f C-a
- C-c C-f a
Move to ‘Mail-Reply-To:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-f C-b
- C-c C-f b
Move to ‘Bcc:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-f C-c
- C-c C-f c
Move to ‘Cc:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-f C-d
- C-c C-f d
Move to ‘Dcc:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-f C-f
- C-c C-f f
Move to ‘Fcc:’ header field (
mh-to-fcc).- C-c C-f C-l
- C-c C-f l
Move to ‘Mail-Followup-To:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-f C-m
- C-c C-f m
Move to ‘From:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-f C-r
- C-c C-f r
Move to ‘Reply-To:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-f C-s
- C-c C-f s
Move to ‘Subject:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-f C-t
- C-c C-f t
Move to ‘To:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-i
Insert a message (
mh-insert-letter).- C-c C-m C-e
Add tag to encrypt the message (
mh-mml-secure-message-encrypt).- C-c C-m C-f
- C-c C-m f
Add tag to forward a message (
mh-compose-forward).- C-c C-m C-g
- C-c C-m g
Add tag to include anonymous ftp reference to a file (
mh-mh-compose-anon-ftp).- C-c C-m C-i
- C-c C-m i
Add tag to include a file such as an image or sound (
mh-compose-insertion).- C-c C-m C-m
- C-c C-m m
Compose MIME message from MML tags (
mh-mml-to-mime).- C-c C-m C-n
- C-c C-m n
Remove any secure message tags (
mh-mml-unsecure-message).- C-c C-m C-s
Add tag to sign the message (
mh-mml-secure-message-sign).- C-c C-m C-t
- C-c C-m t
Add tag to include anonymous ftp reference to a compressed tar file (
mh-mh-compose-external-compressed-tar).- C-c C-m C-u
- C-c C-m u
Undo effects of C-c C-e (
mh-mh-to-mime-undo).- C-c C-m C-x
- C-c C-m x
Add tag to refer to a remote file (
mh-mh-compose-external-type).- C-c C-m e e
Add tag to encrypt the message (
mh-mml-secure-message-encrypt).- C-c C-m e s
Add tag to encrypt and sign the message
(mh-mml-secure-message-signencrypt).- C-c C-m s e
Add tag to encrypt and sign the message
(mh-mml-secure-message-signencrypt).- C-c C-m s s
Add tag to sign the message (
mh-mml-secure-message-sign).- C-c C-o
Insert a newline and leave point before it (
mh-open-line).- C-c C-q
Quit editing and delete draft message (
mh-fully-kill-draft).- C-c C-s
Insert signature in message (
mh-insert-signature).- C-c C-t
Toggle display of header field at point (
mh-letter-toggle-header-field-display).- C-c C-w
Verify recipients, showing expansion of any aliases (
mh-check-whom).- C-c C-y
Insert the current message into the draft buffer (
mh-yank-cur-msg).- C-c M-d
Insert custom fields if recipient is found in
mh-auto-fields-list(mh-insert-auto-fields). See Identities.
Several options from the ‘mh-letter’ customization group are used while editing a draft.
mh-compose-insertion¶Type of MIME message tags in messages (default: ‘MML’ if available; otherwise ‘MH’).
mh-compose-skipped-header-fields¶List of header fields to skip over when navigating in draft (default:
'("From""Organization""References""In-Reply-To""X-Face""Face""X-Image-URL""X-Mailer").mh-compose-space-does-completion-flag¶On means SPC does completion in message header (default: ‘off’).
mh-delete-yanked-msg-window-flag¶On means delete any window displaying the message (default: ‘off’).
mh-extract-from-attribution-verb¶Verb to use for attribution when a message is yanked by C-c C-y (default:
"wrote:").mh-ins-buf-prefix¶String to put before each line of a yanked or inserted message (default:
"> ").mh-letter-complete-function¶Function to call when completing outside of address or folder fields (default:
ispell-complete-word).mh-letter-fill-column¶Fill column to use in MH-Letter mode (default: 72).
mh-mml-method-default¶Default method to use in security tags (default: ‘PGP (MIME)’ if support for it is available; otherwise ‘None’).
mh-signature-file-name¶Source of user’s signature (default:
"~/.signature").mh-signature-separator-flag¶On means a signature separator should be inserted (default: ‘on’).
mh-x-face-file¶File containing X-Face or Face header field to insert in outgoing mail. (default:
"~/.face").mh-yank-behavior¶Controls which part of a message is yanked by C-c C-y (default: ‘Body With Attribution’).
The following hooks are available.
mail-citation-hook¶Hook for modifying a citation just inserted in the mail buffer (default:
nil).mh-before-send-letter-hook¶Hook run at the beginning of the C-c C-c command (default: ‘nil’).
mh-mh-to-mime-hook¶Hook run on the formatted letter by C-c C-e (default: ‘nil’).
mh-insert-signature-hook¶Hook run by C-c C-s after signature has been inserted (default:
nil).
The following face is available.
mh-letter-header-field¶Editable header field value face in draft buffers.
The commands and options introduced here are explained in more detail in the following sections.
- Editing the Message
- Inserting Letter to Which You’re Replying
- Inserting Messages
- Inserting Your Signature
- Inserting Your Picture
- Adding Attachments
- Signing and Encrypting Messages
- Checking Recipients
- Sending a Message
- Killing the Draft
9.1 Editing the Message
Because the header is part of the message, you can edit the header
fields as you wish. However, several convenience commands exist to
help you create and edit them. For example, the command C-c C-f
C-t (mh-to-field; alternatively, C-c C-f t) moves the
cursor to the ‘To:’ header field, creating it if necessary. The
commands for moving to the ‘Cc:’, ‘Subject:’, ‘From:’,
‘Reply-To:’, ‘Mail-Reply-To:’, ‘Mail-Followup-To’,
‘Bcc:’, and ‘Dcc:’ header fields are similar.
One command behaves differently from the others, namely, C-c C-f
C-f (mh-to-fcc; alternatively, C-c C-f f). This command
will prompt you for the folder name in which to file a copy of the
draft. See Folder Selection.
Within the header of the message, the command
TAB
(mh-letter-next-header-field-or-indent) moves between fields
that are highlighted with the face mh-letter-header-field,
skipping those fields listed in
mh-compose-skipped-header-fields. After the last field, this
command then moves point to the message body before cycling back to
the first field. If point is already past the first line of the
message body, then this command indents by calling
indent-relative with the given prefix argument. The command
S-TAB (mh-letter-previous-header-field) moves
backwards between the fields and cycles to the body of the message
after the first field. Unlike the command TAB, it will always
take point to the last field from anywhere in the body.
If the field contains addresses (for example, ‘To:’ or
‘Cc:’) or folders (for example, ‘Fcc:’) then the command
M-TAB (mh-letter-complete) will provide alias
completion (see Aliases). In the body of the message,
M-TAB runs mh-letter-complete-function instead,
which is set to ‘'ispell-complete-word’ by default. The command
M-TAB (mh-letter-complete) takes a prefix argument
that is passed to the mh-letter-complete-function. In addition,
turn on the option mh-compose-space-does-completion-flag to use
the command SPC (mh-letter-complete-or-space) to perform
completion in the header as well; use a prefix argument to specify
more than one space. Addresses are separated by a comma; when you
press the comma, the command mh-letter-confirm-address flashes
the alias expansion in the minibuffer if
mh-alias-flash-on-comma is turned on.
Use the command C-c C-t
mh-letter-toggle-header-field-display to display truncated
header fields. This command is a toggle so entering it again will hide
the field. This command takes a prefix argument: if negative then the
field is hidden, if positive then the field is displayed (for example,
C-u C-c C-t).
Be sure to leave a row of dashes or a blank line between the header and the body of the message.
The body of the message is edited as you would edit any Emacs buffer
although there are a few commands and options to assist you. You can
change the fill column in MH-Letter mode with the option
mh-letter-fill-column. By default, this option is 72 to allow
others to quote your message without line wrapping.
You’ll often include messages that were sent from user agents that
haven’t yet realized that paragraphs consist of more than a single
line. This makes for long lines that wrap in an ugly fashion. You’ll
find that M-q (fill-paragraph) works well even on these
quoted messages, even if they are nested, just as long as all of the
quotes match the value of mh-ins-buf-prefix (see Inserting Letter to Which You’re Replying). For example, let’s assume you have the following in your
draft:
> Hopefully this gives you an idea of what I'm currently doing. I'm \ not sure yet whether I'm completely satisfied with my setup, but \ it's worked okay for me so far.
Running M-q on this paragraph produces:
> Hopefully this gives you an idea of what I'm currently doing. I'm not > sure yet whether I'm completely satisfied with my setup, but it's > worked okay for me so far.
The command C-c C-o (mh-open-line) is similar to the
command C-o (open-line) in that it inserts a newline
after point. It differs in that it also inserts the right number of
quoting characters and spaces so that the next line begins in the same
column as it was. This is useful when breaking up paragraphs in
replies. For example, if this command was used when point was after
the first period in the paragraph above, the result would be this:
> Hopefully this gives you an idea of what I'm currently doing. > I'm not > sure yet whether I'm completely satisfied with my setup, but it's > worked okay for me so far.
Next: Inserting Messages, Previous: Editing the Message, Up: Editing a Draft [Contents][Index]
9.2 Inserting Letter to Which You’re Replying
It is often useful to insert a snippet of text from a letter that
someone mailed to provide some context for your reply. The command
C-c C-y (mh-yank-cur-msg) does this by adding an
attribution, yanking a portion of text from the message to which
you’re replying, and inserting mh-ins-buf-prefix (‘> ’)
before each line.
Michael W Thelen <thelenm@stop.mail-abuse.org> wrote: > Hopefully this gives you an idea of what I'm currently doing. I'm not > sure yet whether I'm completely satisfied with my setup, but it's > worked okay for me so far.
The attribution consists of the sender’s name and email address
followed by the content of the option
mh-extract-from-attribution-verb. This option can be set to
‘wrote:’, ‘a écrit:’, and ‘schrieb:’. You can also use
the ‘Custom String’ menu item to enter your own verb.
The prefix "> " is the default setting for the option
mh-ins-buf-prefix. I suggest that you not modify this option
since it is used by many mailers and news readers: messages are far
easier to read if several included messages have all been indented by
the same string. This prefix is not inserted if you use one of the
supercite flavors of mh-yank-behavior or you have added a
mail-citation-hook as described below.
You can also turn on the mh-delete-yanked-msg-window-flag
option to delete the window containing the original message after
yanking it to make more room on your screen for your reply.
You can control how the message to which you are replying is yanked
into your reply using mh-yank-behavior. To include the entire
message, including the entire header, use ‘Body and
Header’3536.
Use ‘Body’ to yank just the body without the header. To yank only
the portion of the message following the point, set this option to
‘Below Point’.
Choose ‘Invoke supercite’37 to pass the entire message and header through supercite.
If the ‘Body With Attribution’ setting is used, then the message
minus the header is yanked and a simple attribution line is added at
the top using the value of the option
mh-extract-from-attribution-verb. This is the default.
If the ‘Invoke supercite’ or ‘Body With Attribution’
settings are used, the ‘-noformat’ argument is passed to the
repl program to override a ‘-filter’ or ‘-format’
argument. These settings also have ‘Automatically’ variants that
perform the action automatically when you reply so that you don’t need
to use C-c C-y at all. Note that this automatic action is only
performed if the show buffer matches the message being replied to.
People who use the automatic variants tend to turn on the option
mh-delete-yanked-msg-window-flag as well so that the show
window is never displayed.
If the show buffer has a region, the option mh-yank-behavior is
ignored unless its value is one of ‘Attribution’ variants in
which case the attribution is added to the yanked region.
If this isn’t enough, you can gain full control over the appearance of
the included text by setting mail-citation-hook to a function
that modifies it. This hook is ignored if the option
mh-yank-behavior is set to one of the supercite flavors.
Otherwise, this option controls how much of the message is passed to
the hook. The function can find the citation between point and mark
and it should leave point and mark around the modified citation text
for the next hook function. The standard prefix
mh-ins-buf-prefix is not added if this hook is set.
For example, if you use the hook function
trivial-cite (which is NOT part of Emacs), set
mh-yank-behavior to ‘Body and Header’.
Next: Inserting Your Signature, Previous: Inserting Letter to Which You’re Replying, Up: Editing a Draft [Contents][Index]
9.3 Inserting Messages
Messages can be inserted with C-c C-i (mh-insert-letter).
This command prompts you for the folder and message number, which
defaults to the current message in that folder. It then inserts the
messages, indented by mh-ins-buf-prefix (‘> ’) unless
mh-yank-behavior is set to one of the supercite flavors in
which case supercite is used to format the message. Certain
undesirable header fields (see
mh-invisible-header-fields-compiled) are removed before
insertion.
If given a prefix argument (like C-u C-c C-i), the header is left intact, the message is not indented, and ‘> ’ is not inserted before each line. This command leaves the mark before the letter and point after it.
Next: Inserting Your Picture, Previous: Inserting Messages, Up: Editing a Draft [Contents][Index]
9.4 Inserting Your Signature
You can insert your signature at the current cursor location with the
command C-c C-s (mh-insert-signature).
By default, the text of your signature is taken from the file
~/.signature. You can read from other sources by changing the
option mh-signature-file-name. This file may contain a
vCard in which case an attachment is added with the vCard.
The option mh-signature-file-name may also be a symbol, in
which case that function is called. You may not want a signature
separator to be added for you; instead you may want to insert one
yourself. Options that you may find useful to do this include
mh-signature-separator (when inserting a signature separator)
and mh-signature-separator-regexp (for finding said separator).
The function mh-signature-separator-p, which reports t
if the buffer contains a separator, may be useful as well.
A signature separator ("-- ") will be added if the signature
block does not contain one and mh-signature-separator-flag is
on. It is not recommended that you change this option since various
mail user agents, including MH-E, use the separator to present the
signature differently, and to suppress the signature when replying or
yanking a letter into a draft.
The hook mh-insert-signature-hook is run after the signature is
inserted. Hook functions may access the actual name of the file or the
function used to insert the signature with
mh-signature-file-name.
The signature can also be inserted using Identities. See Identities.
Next: Adding Attachments, Previous: Inserting Your Signature, Up: Editing a Draft [Contents][Index]
9.5 Inserting Your Picture
You can insert your picture in the header of your mail message so that
recipients see your face in the ‘From:’ header field if their
mail user agent is sophisticated enough. In MH-E, this is done by
placing your image in the file named by the option
mh-x-face-file which is ~/.face by default.
If the file starts with either of the strings ‘X-Face:’, ‘Face:’ or ‘X-Image-URL:’ then the contents are added to the message header verbatim. Otherwise it is assumed that the file contains the value of the ‘X-Face:’ header field.
The ‘X-Face:’ header field, which is a low-resolution, black and
white image, can be generated using the
compface command. The Online X-Face Converter is a useful resource for quick
conversion of images into ‘X-Face:’ header fields.
Use the make-face script to convert a JPEG image to the higher
resolution, color, ‘Face:’ header field.
The URL of any image can be used for the ‘X-Image-URL:’ field and no processing of the image is required.
To prevent the setting of any of these header fields, either set
mh-x-face-file to nil, or simply ensure that the file
defined by this option doesn’t exist.
See Viewing Your Mail, to see how these header fields are displayed in MH-E.
Next: Signing and Encrypting Messages, Previous: Inserting Your Picture, Up: Editing a Draft [Contents][Index]
9.6 Adding Attachments
MH-E has the capability to create multimedia messages. It uses the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) protocol38 The MIME protocol allows you to incorporate images, sound, video, binary files, and even commands that fetch a file with ‘ftp’ when your recipient reads the message!
If you were to create a multimedia message with plain MH commands, you
would insert mhbuild or mhn directives (henceforth
called MH-style directives into your draft and use the
mhbuild command in nmh or mhn command in MH and
GNU mailutils to expand them. MH-E works in much the same way,
although it provides a handful of commands prefixed with C-c C-m
to insert the directives so you don’t need to remember the syntax of
them. Remember: you can always add MH-style directives by
hand39.
In addition to MH-style directives, MH-E also supports MML (MIME
Meta Language) tags40. The option mh-compose-insertion can be used to choose
between them. By default, this option is set to ‘MML’ if it is
supported since it provides a lot more functionality. This option can
also be set to ‘MH’ if MH-style directives are preferred.
The MH-E MIME commands require a media type for each body part or attachment. For example, a PDF document is of type ‘application/pdf’ and an HTML document is of type ‘text/html’. Some commands fill in the media type for you, whereas others require you to enter one.
In the cases where MH-E can do so, it will determine the media type
automatically. It uses the file command to do this. Failing
that, the Emacs function mailcap-mime-types is used to provide
a list from which to choose. This function usually reads the file
/etc/mime.types.
Whether the media type is chosen automatically, or you choose it from a list, use the type that seems to match best the file that you are including. In the case of binaries, the media type ‘application/x-executable’ can be useful. If you can’t find an appropriate media type, use ‘text/plain’ for text messages and ‘application/octet-stream’ for everything else.
You are also sometimes asked for a content description. This is simply an optional brief phrase, in your own words, that describes the object. If you don’t care to enter a content description, just press return and none will be included; however, a reader may skip over multimedia fields unless the content description is compelling.
You can also create your own MIME body parts. In the following example, I describe how you can create and edit a ‘text/enriched’ body part to liven up your plain text messages with boldface, underlining, and italics. I include an Emacs function which inserts enriched text tags.
(defvar enriched-text-types '(("b" . "bold") ("i" . "italic")
("u" . "underline")
("s" . "smaller") ("B" . "bigger")
("f" . "fixed")
("c" . "center"))
"Alist of (final-character . tag) choices for add-enriched-text.
Additional types can be found in RFC 1563.")
(defun add-enriched-text (begin end)
"Add enriched text tags around region.
The tag used comes from the list enriched-text-types and is
specified by the last keystroke of the command. When called from Lisp,
arguments are BEGIN and END."
(interactive "r")
;; Set type to the tag indicated by the last keystroke.
(let ((type (cdr (assoc (char-to-string (logior last-input-char ?`))
enriched-text-types))))
(save-restriction ; restores state from narrow-to-region
(narrow-to-region begin end) ; narrow view to region
(goto-char (point-min)) ; move to beginning of text
(insert "<" type ">") ; insert beginning tag
(goto-char (point-max)) ; move to end of text
(insert "</" type ">")))) ; insert terminating tag
Emacs function for entering enriched text
To use the function add-enriched-text, first add it to
~/.emacs and create key bindings for it (see Composing).
Then, in your plain text message, set the mark with C-@ or C-SPC, type in the text to be highlighted, and type C-c t b. This adds ‘<bold>’ where you set the mark and adds ‘</bold>’ at the location of your cursor, giving you something like: ‘You should be <bold>very</bold>’.
Before sending this message, use C-c C-m C-m
(mh-mml-to-mime)41 to add
MIME header fields. Then replace ‘text/plain’ with
‘text/enriched’ in the ‘Content-Type:’ header field.
You may also be interested in investigating sgml-mode.
Including Files
Binaries, images, sound, and video can be inserted in your message
with the command C-c C-m C-i (mh-compose-insertion). You
are prompted for the filename containing the object, the media type if
it cannot be determined automatically, and a content description. If
you’re using MH-style directives, you will also be prompted for
additional attributes.
Forwarding Multimedia Messages
Mail may be forwarded with MIME using the command C-c C-m
C-f (mh-compose-forward). You are prompted for a content
description, the name of the folder in which the messages to forward
are located, and a range of messages, which defaults to the current
message in that folder. See Ranges.
Including an FTP Reference
You can have your message initiate an ftp transfer when the
recipient reads the message. To do this, use the command C-c C-m
C-g (mh-mh-compose-anon-ftp). You are prompted for the remote
host and filename, the media type, and the content description.
Including tar Files
If the remote file is a compressed tar file, you can use C-c C-m
C-t (mh-mh-compose-external-compressed-tar). Then, in addition
to retrieving the file via anonymous ftp as per the command
C-c C-m C-g (mh-mh-compose-anon-ftp), the file will also
be uncompressed and untarred. You are prompted for the remote host and
filename and the content description.
Including Other External Files
The command C-c C-m C-x (mh-mh-compose-external-type) is
a general utility for referencing external files. In fact, all of the
other commands that insert tags to access external files call this
command. You are prompted for the access type, remote host and
filename, and content type. If you provide a prefix argument, you are
also prompted for a content description, attributes, parameters, and a
comment.
Previewing Multimedia Messages
When you are finished editing a MIME message, it might look like this:
3 t08/24 root received fax files on Wed Aug 24 11:00:
4+t08/24 To:wohler Test<<This is a test message to get the
--:%% {+inbox} 4 msgs (1-4) Bot L4 (MH-Folder Show)---------------
To: wohler
cc:
Subject: Test of MIME
--------
Here is the SETI@Home logo:
<#part type="image/x-xpm" filename="~/lib/images/setiathome.xpm"
disposition=inline description="SETI@home logo">
<#/part>
--:** {draft} All L8 (MH-Letter)----------------------------------
|
MH-E MIME draft
Typically, you send a message with attachments just like any other message (see Sending a Message).
However, you may take a sneak preview of the MIME encoding if you
wish by running the command C-c C-m C-m (mh-mml-to-mime).
The following screen shows the MIME encoding specified by the
tags. You can see why mail user agents are usually built to hide these
details from the user.
To: wohler
cc:
Subject: Test of MIME
X-Mailer: MH-E 8.1; nmh 1.1; GNU Emacs 23.1
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="=-=-="
--------
--=-=-=
Here is the SETI@Home logo:
--=-=-=
Content-Type: image/x-xpm
Content-Disposition: inline; filename=setiathome.xpm
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Description: SETI@home logo
LyogWFBNICovCnN0YXRpYyBjaGFyICogc2V0aWF0aG9tZV94cG1bXSA9IHsKIjQ1IDQ1IDc2N
--:-- {draft} Top L1 (MH-Letter)----------------------------------
|
MH-E MIME draft ready to send
This action can be undone by running C-_ (undo).
If you’re using MH-style directives, use C-c C-e
(mh-mh-to-mime) instead of C-c C-m C-m. This runs the
command mhbuild (mhn) on the message which expands
the tags42. This action can be undone by running C-c C-m C-u
(mh-mh-to-mime-undo), which works by reverting to a backup
file. You are prompted to confirm this action, but you can avoid the
confirmation by adding an argument (for example, C-u C-c C-m
C-u).
If you wish to pass additional arguments to mhbuild
(mhn) to affect how it builds your message, use the option
mh-mh-to-mime-args. For example, you can build a consistency
check into the message by setting mh-mh-to-mime-args to
‘-check’. The recipient of your message can then run
‘mhbuild -check’ on the message—mhbuild
(mhn) will complain if the message has been corrupted on the
way. The command C-c C-e only consults this option when given a
prefix argument (as in C-u C-c C-e).
The hook mh-mh-to-mime-hook is called after the message has
been formatted by C-c C-e.
Next: Checking Recipients, Previous: Adding Attachments, Up: Editing a Draft [Contents][Index]
9.7 Signing and Encrypting Messages
MH-E can sign and encrypt messages as defined in RFC 3156. If you should choose to sign or encrypt your message, use one of the following commands to do so any time before sending your message.
The command C-c C-m C-s (mh-mml-secure-message-sign)
inserts the following tag:
<#secure method=pgpmime mode=sign>
This is used to sign your message digitally. Likewise, the command
C-c C-m C-e (mh-mml-secure-message-encrypt) inserts the
following tag:
<#secure method=pgpmime mode=encrypt>
This is used to encrypt your message. Finally, the command C-c
C-m s e (mh-mml-secure-message-signencrypt) inserts the
following tag:
<#secure method=pgpmime mode=signencrypt>
This is used to sign and encrypt your message. In each of these cases,
a proper multipart message is created for you when you send the
message. Use the command C-c C-m C-n
(mh-mml-unsecure-message) to remove these tags. Use a prefix
argument (as in C-u C-c C-m s e) to be prompted for one of the
possible security methods (see mh-mml-method-default).
The option mh-mml-method-default is used to select between a
variety of mail security mechanisms. The default is ‘PGP (MIME)’
if it is supported; otherwise, the default is ‘None’. Other
mechanisms include vanilla ‘PGP’ and ‘S/MIME’.
Next: Sending a Message, Previous: Signing and Encrypting Messages, Up: Editing a Draft [Contents][Index]
9.8 Checking Recipients
The command C-c C-w (mh-check-whom) expands aliases so
you can check the actual address(es) in the alias. A new buffer named
*MH-E Recipients* is created with the output of whom
(see Miscellaneous Commands, Variables, and Buffers)43.
Next: Killing the Draft, Previous: Checking Recipients, Up: Editing a Draft [Contents][Index]
9.9 Sending a Message
When you are all through editing a message, you send it with the
command C-c C-c (mh-send-letter). You can give a prefix
argument (as in C-u C-c C-c) to monitor the first stage of the
delivery; this output can be found in a buffer called *MH-E Mail
Delivery* (see Miscellaneous Commands, Variables, and Buffers).
The hook mh-before-send-letter-hook is run at the beginning of
the command C-c C-c. For example, if you want to check your
spelling in your message before sending, add the function
ispell-message.
In case the MH send program44 is installed under a different name, use
mh-send-prog to tell MH-E the name.
The hook mh-annotate-msg-hook is run after annotating the
message and scan line (see Sending Mail).
Previous: Sending a Message, Up: Editing a Draft [Contents][Index]
9.10 Killing the Draft
If for some reason you are not happy with the draft, you can use the
command C-c C-q (mh-fully-kill-draft) to kill the draft
buffer and delete the draft message. Use the command C-x k
(kill-buffer) if you don’t want to delete the draft message.
Next: Identities, Previous: Editing a Draft, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
10 Aliases
MH aliases are used in the same way in MH-E as they are in MH. Any alias listed as a recipient will be expanded when the message is sent. This chapter discusses other things you can do with aliases in MH-E.
The following commands are available in MH-Letter mode with the
exception of mh-alias-reload which can be called from anywhere.
- SPC
Perform completion or insert space (
mh-letter-complete-or-space).- M-TAB
Perform completion on header field or word preceding point (
mh-letter-complete).- mh-alias-apropos
Show all aliases or addresses that match a regular expression.
- mh-alias-grab-from-field
Add alias for the sender of the current message
- mh-alias-reload
Reload MH aliases.
The ‘mh-alias’ customization group contains options associated with aliases.
mh-alias-completion-ignore-case-flag¶On means don’t consider case significant in MH alias completion (default: ‘on’).
mh-alias-expand-aliases-flag¶On means to expand aliases entered in the minibuffer (default: ‘off’).
mh-alias-flash-on-comma¶Specify whether to flash address or warn on translation (default: ‘Flash but Don't Warn If No Alias’).
mh-alias-insert-file¶Filename used to store a new MH-E alias (default: ‘Use Aliasfile Profile Component’).
mh-alias-insertion-location¶Specifies where new aliases are entered in alias files (default: ‘Alphabetical’).
mh-alias-local-users¶If ‘on’, local users are added to alias completion (default: ‘on’).
mh-alias-local-users-prefix¶String prefixed to the real names of users from the password file (default:
"local.".mh-alias-passwd-gecos-comma-separator-flag¶On means the GECOS field in the password file uses a comma separator (default: ‘on’).
The following hook is available.
mh-alias-reloaded-hook¶Hook run by
mh-alias-reloadafter loading aliases (default:nil).
Adding Addresses to Draft
You can use aliases when you are adding recipients to a message.
In order to use minibuffer prompting for recipients and the subject
line in the minibuffer, turn on the option
mh-compose-prompt-flag (see Composing), and use the
TAB (minibuffer-complete) command to complete aliases
(and optionally local logins) when prompted for the recipients. Turn
on the option mh-alias-expand-aliases-flag if you want these
aliases to be expanded to their respective addresses in the draft.
Otherwise, you can complete aliases in the header of the draft with
M-TAB (mh-letter-complete) or SPC
(mh-letter-complete-or-space).
As MH ignores case in the aliases, so too does MH-E. However, you may
turn off the option mh-alias-completion-ignore-case-flag to
make case significant which can be used to segregate completion of
your aliases. You might use uppercase for mailing lists and lowercase
for people. For example, you might have:
mark.baushke: Mark Baushke <mdb@stop.mail-abuse.org> MH-E: MH-E Mailing List <mh-e-devel@stop.mail-abuse.org>
When this option is turned off, if you were to type M in the ‘To:’ field and then M-TAB, then you’d get the list; if you started with m and then entered M-TAB, then you’d get Mark’s address. Note that this option affects completion only. If you were to enter Mark.Baushke, it would still be identified with your ‘mark.baushke’ alias.
To verify that the alias you’ve entered is valid, the alias will be
displayed in the minibuffer when you type a comma
(mh-letter-confirm-address or
mh-alias-minibuffer-confirm-address if the option
mh-compose-prompt-flag is turned on). See Composing. This
behavior can be controlled with the option
mh-alias-flash-on-comma which provides three choices:
‘Flash but Don't Warn If No Alias’, ‘Flash and Warn If No
Alias’, and ‘Don't Flash Nor Warn If No Alias’.
For another way to verify the alias expansion, see Checking Recipients.
Loading Aliases
MH-E loads aliases for completion and folder name hints from various
places. It uses the MH command ali45 to
read aliases from the files listed in the profile component
‘Aliasfile:’ as well as system-wide aliases (for example,
/etc/nmh/MailAliases).
In addition, aliases are created from /etc/passwd entries with a user ID larger than a magical number, typically 200. This can be a handy tool on a machine where you and co-workers exchange messages. These aliases have the form ‘local.first.last’ if a real name is present in the password file. Otherwise, the alias will have the form ‘local.login’.
The prefix ‘local.’ can be modified via the option
mh-alias-local-users-prefix. This option can also be set to
‘Use Login’.
For example, consider the following password file entry:
psg:x:1000:1000:Peter S Galbraith,,,:/home/psg:/bin/tcsh
The following settings of option mh-alias-local-users-prefix
will produce the associated aliases:
"local."local.peter.galbraith
""peter.galbraith
Use Loginpsg
In the example above, commas are used to separate different values
within the so-called GECOS field. This is a fairly common usage.
However, in the rare case that the GECOS field in your password file
is not separated by commas and whose contents may contain commas, you
can turn the option mh-alias-passwd-gecos-comma-separator-flag
off.
If you’re on a system with thousands of users you don’t know, and the
loading of local aliases slows MH-E down noticeably, then the local
alias feature can be disabled by turning off the option
mh-alias-local-users. This option also takes a string which is
executed to generate the password file. For example, use ‘ypcat
passwd’ to obtain the NIS password file.
Since aliases are updated frequently, MH-E reloads aliases
automatically whenever an alias lookup occurs if an alias source has
changed. However, you can reload your aliases manually by calling the
command M-x mh-alias-reload directly. This command runs
mh-alias-reloaded-hook after the aliases have been loaded.
Adding Aliases
In the past, you have manually added aliases to your alias file(s) listed in your ‘Aliasfile:’ profile component. MH-E provides other methods for maintaining your alias file(s).
You can use the M-x mh-alias-add-alias command which will prompt you for the alias and address that you would like to add. If the alias exists already, you will have the choice of inserting the new alias before or after the old alias. In the former case, this alias will be used when sending mail to this alias. In the latter case, the alias serves as an additional folder name hint when filing messages (see Folder Selection).
Earlier, the alias prefix ‘local’ was presented. You can use other prefixes to organize your aliases or disambiguate entries. You might use prefixes for locales, jobs, or activities. For example, I have:
; Work attensity.don.mitchell: Don Mitchell <dmitchell@stop.mail-abuse.com> isharp.don.mitchell: Don Mitchell <donaldsmitchell@stop.mail-abuse.com> ... ; Sport diving.ken.mayer: Ken Mayer <kmayer@stop.mail-abuse.com> sailing.mike.maloney: Mike Maloney <mmaloney@stop.mail-abuse.com> ... ; Personal ariane.kolkmann: Ariane Kolkmann <ArianeKolkmann@stop.mail-abuse.com> ...
Using prefixes instead of postfixes helps you explore aliases during completion. If you forget the name of an old dive buddy, you can enter ‘div’ and then SPC to get a listing of all your dive buddies.
An alias for the sender of the current message is added automatically by clicking on the ‘Grab From alias’ tool bar button or by running the M-x mh-alias-grab-from-field command. Aliases for other recipients of the current message are added by placing your cursor over the desired recipient and giving the M-x mh-alias-add-address-under-point command.
The options mh-alias-insert-file and
mh-alias-insertion-location controls how and where these aliases
are inserted.
The default setting of option mh-alias-insert-file is ‘Use
Aliasfile Profile Component’. This option can also hold the name of a
file or a list a file names. If this option is set to a list of file
names, or the ‘Aliasfile:’ profile component contains more than
one file name, MH-E will prompt for one of them.
The option mh-alias-insertion-location is set to
‘Alphabetical’ by default. If you organize your alias file in
other ways, then the settings ‘Top’ and ‘Bottom’ might be
more appropriate.
Querying Aliases
If you can’t quite remember an alias, you can use M-x mh-alias-apropos to show all aliases or addresses that match a regular expression (see the section Syntax of Regular Expressions in The GNU Emacs Manual).
Next: The Speedbar, Previous: Aliases, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
11 Identities
MH-E supports the concept of multiple personalities or identities. This means that you can easily have a different header and signature at home and at work.
A couple of commands are used to insert identities in MH-Letter mode which are also found in the ‘Identity’ menu.
- C-c C-d
Insert fields specified by given identity (
mh-insert-identity).- C-c M-d
Insert custom fields if recipient found in
mh-auto-fields-list(mh-insert-auto-fields).
The ‘mh-identity’ customization group contains the following options.
mh-auto-fields-list¶List of recipients for which header lines are automatically inserted (default:
nil).mh-auto-fields-prompt-flag¶On means to prompt before sending if fields inserted (default: ‘on’)
mh-identity-default¶Default identity to use when
mh-letter-modeis called (default: ‘None’).mh-identity-handlers¶Handler functions for fields in
mh-identity-list.mh-identity-list¶List of identities (default:
nil).
Some of the common header fields that people change depending on the context are the ‘From:’ and ‘Organization:’ fields, as well as the signature.
This is done by customizing the option mh-identity-list. In the
customization buffer for this option, click on the ‘INS’ button
and enter a label such as ‘Home’ or ‘Work’. Then click on
the ‘INS’ button with the label ‘Add at least one item
below’. The ‘Value Menu’ has the following menu items:
- ‘From Field’
Specify an alternate ‘From:’ header field. You must include a valid email address. A standard format is ‘First Last <login@host.domain>’. If you use an initial with a period, then you must quote your name as in ‘"First I. Last" <login@host.domain>’.
- ‘Organization Field’
People usually list the name of the company where they work here.
- ‘Other Field’
Set any arbitrary header field and value here. Unless the header field is a standard one, precede the name of your field’s label with ‘X-’, as in ‘X-Fruit-of-the-Day:’.
- ‘Attribution Verb’
This value overrides the setting of
mh-extract-from-attribution-verb. See Inserting Letter to Which You’re Replying.- ‘Signature’
Set your signature with this item. You can specify the contents of
mh-signature-file-name, a file, or a function. See Inserting Your Signature.- ‘GPG Key ID’
Specify a different key to sign or encrypt messages.
You can select the identities you have added via the menu called
‘Identity’ in the MH-Letter buffer. You can also use C-c
C-d (mh-insert-identity). To clear the fields and signature
added by the identity, select the ‘None’ identity.
The ‘Identity’ menu contains two other items to save you from
having to set the identity on every message. The menu item ‘Set
Default for Session’ can be used to set the default identity to the
current identity until you exit Emacs. The menu item ‘Save as
Default’ sets the option mh-identity-default to the current
identity setting. You can also customize the option
mh-identity-default in the usual fashion. If you find that you
need to add another identity, the menu item ‘Customize
Identities’ is available for your convenience.
The option mh-auto-fields-list can also be used to set the
identity depending on the recipient to provide even more control. To
customize mh-auto-fields-list, click on the ‘INS’ button
and enter a regular expression for the recipient’s address
(see the section
Syntax of Regular Expressions in
The GNU Emacs Manual).
Click on the ‘INS’ button with the ‘Add at least one item
below’ label. The ‘Value Menu’ contains the following menu items:
- ‘Identity’
Select an identity from those configured in
mh-identity-list. All of the information for that identity will be added if the recipient matches.- ‘Fcc Field’
Insert an ‘Fcc:’ header field with the folder you provide. When you send the message, MH will put a copy of your message in this folder.
- ‘Mail-Followup-To Field’
Insert an ‘Mail-Followup-To:’ header field with the recipients you provide. If the recipient’s mail user agent supports this header field46, then their replies will go to the addresses listed. This is useful if their replies go both to the list and to you and you don’t have a mechanism to suppress duplicates. If you reply to someone not on the list, you must either remove the ‘Mail-Followup-To:’ field, or ensure the recipient is also listed there so that he receives replies to your reply.
- ‘Other Field’
Other header fields may be added using this menu item.
These fields can only be added after the recipient is known. Because
you can continue to add recipients as you edit the draft, MH-E waits
until the message is sent to perform the auto-insertions. This seems
strange at first, but you’ll get used to it. There are two ways to
help you feel that the desired fields are added. The first is the
action when the message is sent: if any fields are added
automatically, you are given a chance to see and to confirm these
fields before the message is actually sent. You can do away with this
confirmation by turning off the option
mh-auto-fields-prompt-flag. The second method is manual: once
the header contains one or more recipients, you may run the command
C-c M-d (mh-insert-auto-fields) or choose the
‘Identity -> Insert Auto Fields’ menu item to insert these fields
manually. However, if you use this command, the automatic insertion
when the message is sent is disabled.
You should avoid using the same header field in
mh-auto-fields-list and mh-identity-list definitions
that may apply to the same message as the result is undefined.
The option mh-identity-handlers is used to change the way that
fields, signatures, and attributions in mh-identity-list are
added. To customize mh-identity-handlers, replace the name of
an existing handler function associated with the field you want to
change with the name of a function you have written. You can also
click on an ‘INS’ button and insert a field of your choice and
the name of the function you have written to handle it.
The ‘Field’ field can be any field that you’ve used in your
mh-identity-list. The special fields ‘:attribution-verb’,
‘:signature’, or ‘:pgg-default-user-id’ are used for the
mh-identity-list choices ‘Attribution Verb’,
‘Signature’, and ‘GPG Key ID’ respectively.
The handler associated with the ‘:default’ field is used when no other field matches.
The handler functions are passed two or three arguments: the field itself (for example, ‘From’), or one of the special fields (for example, ‘:signature’), and the action ‘'remove’ or ‘'add’. If the action is ‘'add’, an additional argument containing the value for the field is given.
Next: The Menu Bar, Previous: Identities, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
12 The Speedbar
You can also use the speedbar
(see the section
Speedbar Frames in The GNU Emacs Manual)
to view your folders. To bring up the speedbar, run M-x speedbar
RET. You will see a new frame appear with all of your MH
folders. Folders with unseen messages appear in boldface. Click on a
folder name with mouse-2 to visit that folder in a similar
fashion to the command F v (mh-visit-folder)
(see Organizing Your Mail with Folders). Click on the ‘+’ icon to expand and view the
sub-folders of that folder.
The speedbar can be manipulated with the keyboard as well. Use the Emacs navigational keys (like the arrow keys, or C-n) to move the cursor over the desired folder and then use the shortcuts for the menu items listed in the table below.
- ‘Visit Folder’ (RET)
Visits the selected folder just as if you had used F v (
mh-speed-view).- ‘Expand Nested Folders’ (+)
Expands the selected folder in the speedbar, exposing the children folders inside it (
mh-speed-expand-folder).- ‘Contract Nested Folders’ (-)
Contracts or collapses the selected folder in the speedbar, hiding the children folders inside it (
mh-speed-contract-folder).- ‘Refresh Speedbar’ (r)
Regenerates the list of folders in the speedbar. Run this command if you’ve added or deleted a folder, or want to update the unseen message count before the next automatic update (
mh-speed-refresh).
You can click on mouse-3 to bring up a context menu that
contains these items. Dismiss the speedbar with C-x 5 0
(delete-frame).
The MH-E speedbar uses the MH command flists47 to generate the list of
folders. The ‘mh-speedbar’ customization group contains the
following option which controls how often the speedbar calls
flists.
mh-speed-update-interval¶Time between speedbar updates in seconds (default: 60). Set to 0 to disable automatic update.
You can modify the appearance of the folders in the speedbar by customizing the following faces.
Next: The Tool Bar, Previous: The Speedbar, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
13 The Menu Bar
For those of you who prefer to mouse and menu instead of using the meta-coke-bottle-bucky keys, MH-E provides menu items for most of its functions. The MH-Folder buffer adds the ‘Folder’, ‘Message’, and ‘Sequence’ menus. The MH-Letter buffer adds the ‘Identity’ and ‘Letter’ menus. The MH-Search buffer adds the ‘Search’ menu. There’s no need to list the actual items here, as you can more easily see them for yourself, and the functions are already described elsewhere in this manual.
For a description of the menu bar, please see the section The Menu Bar in The GNU Emacs Manual.
The Emacs manual describes how to get help for a particular menu item. You can also look up a menu item in the index of this manual in two ways: all of the menu items are listed alphabetically, and you can also browse all of the items under the index entry ‘menu item’.
Next: Searching Through Messages, Previous: The Menu Bar, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
14 The Tool Bar
Emacs also provides a graphical tool bar. For a description of the tool bar, please see the section Tool Bars in The GNU Emacs Manual.
MH-E adds several icons to this tool bar; you can modify the MH-E aspects of the tool bar via the ‘mh-tool-bar’ customization group.
List of buttons to include in MH-Folder tool bar (default: a checklist too long to list here).
List of buttons to include in MH-Letter tool bar (default: a checklist too long to list here).
mh-tool-bar-search-function¶Function called by the tool bar search button (default:
mh-search).
Icons for some of MH-E’s functions are added to the tool bar.
In either case, you can select which of these functions you’d like to
see by customizing the options mh-tool-bar-folder-buttons and
mh-tool-bar-letter-buttons. As you probably guessed, the former
customizes the tool bar in MH-Folder mode and the latter in MH-Letter
mode. Both of these options present you with a list of functions;
check the functions whose icons you want to see and clear the check
boxes for those you don’t.
The function associated with the searching icon can be set via the
option mh-tool-bar-search-function. By default, this is set to
mh-search. See Searching Through Messages. You can also choose ‘Other
Function’ from the ‘Value Menu’ and enter a function of your own
choosing.
Next: Viewing Message Threads, Previous: The Tool Bar, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
15 Searching Through Messages
Earlier, the command F s (mh-search) was introduced which
helps you find messages that lie buried in your folders
(see Organizing Your Mail with Folders). This chapter covers this command in more detail.
Several commands are used to compose the search criteria and to start
searching. A couple of them can be found in the ‘Search’ menu.
- C-c ?
Display cheat sheet for the MH-E commands (
mh-help).- C-c C-c
Find messages using
mh-search-program(mh-index-do-search).- C-c C-p
Find messages using
pick(mh-pick-do-search).- C-c ?
Display cheat sheet for the MH-E commands (
mh-help).- C-c C-f a
- C-c C-f C-a
Move to ‘Mail-Reply-To:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-f b
- C-c C-f C-b
Move to ‘Bcc:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-f c
- C-c C-f C-c
Move to ‘Cc:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-f d
- C-c C-f C-d
Move to ‘Dcc:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-f f
- C-c C-f C-f
Move to ‘Fcc:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-f l
- C-c C-f C-l
Move to ‘Mail-Followup-To:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-f m
- C-c C-f C-m
Move to ‘From:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-f r
- C-c C-f C-r
Move to ‘Reply-To:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-f s
- C-c C-f C-s
Move to ‘Subject:’ header field (
mh-to-field).- C-c C-f t
- C-c C-f C-t
Move to ‘To:’ header field (
mh-to-field).
Another few commands are available in the MH-Folder buffer resulting from a search.
- TAB
Jump to the next folder marker (
mh-index-next-folder).- S-TAB
Jump to the previous folder marker (
mh-index-previous-folder).- v
Visit original folder from where the message at point was found (
mh-index-visit-folder).
There is one option from the ‘mh-search’ customization group used in searching.
mh-search-program¶Search program that MH-E shall use (default: ‘Auto-detect’).
The following hook is available.
mh-search-mode-hook¶Hook run upon entry to
mh-search-mode(default:nil).
The following face is available.
mh-search-folder¶Folder heading face in MH-Folder buffers created by searches.
The command F s (mh-search-folder) helps you find
messages in your entire corpus of mail. You can search for messages to
or from a particular person or about a particular subject. In fact,
you can also search for messages containing selected strings in any
arbitrary header field or any string found within the messages.
Out of the box, MH-E uses pick to find messages. With a
little extra effort, you can set an indexing program which rewards you
with extremely quick results. The drawback is that sometimes the index
does not contain the words you’re looking for. You can still use
pick in these situations.
You are prompted for the folder to search. This can be ‘all’ to search all folders. Note that the search works recursively on the listed folder.
Next, an MH-Search buffer appears where you can enter search criteria.
From: To: Cc: Date: Subject: -------- # --:** search-pattern All L7 (MH-Search)--------------------------- Type C-c C-c to search messages, C-c C-p to use pick, C-c ? for help |
Search window
Edit this template by entering your search criteria in an appropriate header field that is already there, or create a new field yourself. If the string you’re looking for could be anywhere in a message, then place the string underneath the row of dashes.
As an example, let’s say that we want to find messages from Ginnean about horseback riding in the Kosciusko National Park (Australia) during January, 1994. Normally we would start with a broad search and narrow it down if necessary to produce a manageable amount of data, but we’ll cut to the chase and create a fairly restrictive set of criteria as follows:
From: ginnean To: Cc: Date: Jan 1994 Subject: -------- horse kosciusko
As with MH-Letter mode, MH-Search provides commands like C-c C-f
C-t (mh-to-field) to help you fill in the blanks.
See Editing the Message.
If you find that you do the same thing over and over when editing the
search template, you may wish to bind some shortcuts to keys. This can
be done with the variable mh-search-mode-hook, which is called
when F s is run on a new pattern.
To perform the search, type C-c C-c (mh-index-do-search).
Sometimes you’re searching for text that is either not indexed, or
hasn’t been indexed yet. In this case you can override the default
method with the pick method by running the command C-c C-p
(mh-pick-do-search).
The messages that are found are put in a temporary sub-folder of
‘+mhe-index’ and are displayed in an MH-Folder buffer. This
buffer is special because it displays messages from multiple folders;
each set of messages from a given folder has a heading with the folder
name. The appearance of the heading can be modified by customizing the
face mh-search-folder. You can jump back and forth between the
headings using the commands TAB
(mh-index-next-folder) and S-TAB
(mh-index-previous-folder).
In addition, the command v (mh-index-visit-folder) can be
used to visit the folder of the message at point. Initially, only the
messages that matched the search criteria are displayed in the folder.
While the temporary buffer has its own set of message numbers, the
actual messages numbers are shown in the visited folder. Thus, the
command v is useful to find the actual message number of an
interesting message, or to view surrounding messages with the command
F r mh-rescan-folder. See Organizing Your Mail with Folders.
Because this folder is temporary, you’ll probably get in the habit of
killing it when you’re done with F k (mh-kill-folder).
See Organizing Your Mail with Folders.
You can regenerate the results by running F s with a prefix argument.
Note: This command uses an ‘X-MHE-Checksum:’ header field to
cache the MD5 checksum of a message. This means that if an incoming
message already contains an ‘X-MHE-Checksum:’ field, that message
might not be found by this command. The following procmail
recipe avoids this problem by renaming the existing header field:
:0 wf | formail -R "X-MHE-Checksum" "X-Old-MHE-Checksum"
See Limiting Display, for an alternative interface to searching.
15.1 Configuring Indexed Searches
The command F s (mh-search) runs the command defined by
the option mh-search-program. The default value is
‘Auto-detect’ which means that MH-E will automatically choose one
of swish++, swish-e, mairix,
namazu, pick and grep in that order. If,
for example, you have both swish++ and mairix
installed and you want to use mairix, then you can set this
option to ‘mairix’.
The following sub-sections describe how to set up the various indexing programs to use with MH-E.
15.1.1 swish++
In the examples below, replace /home/user/Mail with the path to your MH directory.
First create the directory /home/user/Mail/.swish++. Then create the file /home/user/Mail/.swish++/swish++.conf with the following contents:
IncludeMeta Bcc Cc Comments Content-Description From Keywords IncludeMeta Newsgroups Resent-To Subject To IncludeMeta Message-Id References In-Reply-To IncludeFile Mail * IndexFile /home/user/Mail/.swish++/swish++.index
Use the following command line to generate the swish index. Run this daily from cron:
find /home/user/Mail -path /home/user/Mail/mhe-index -prune \
-o -path /home/user/Mail/.swish++ -prune \
-o -name "[0-9]*" -print \
| index -c /home/user/Mail/.swish++/swish++.conf -
This command does not index the folders that hold the results of your searches in ‘+mhe-index’ since they tend to be ephemeral and the original messages are indexed anyway.
On some systems (Debian GNU/Linux, for example), use index++
instead of index.
15.1.2 swish
In the examples below, replace /home/user/Mail with the path to your MH directory.
First create the directory /home/user/Mail/.swish. Then create the file /home/user/Mail/.swish/config with the following contents:
DefaultContents TXT* IndexDir /home/user/Mail IndexFile /home/user/Mail/.swish/index IndexName "Mail Index" IndexDescription "Mail Index" IndexPointer "https://nowhere" IndexAdmin "nobody" #MetaNames automatic IndexReport 3 FollowSymLinks no UseStemming no IgnoreTotalWordCountWhenRanking yes WordCharacters abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789- BeginCharacters abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz EndCharacters abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789 IgnoreLimit 50 1000 IndexComments 0 FileRules filename contains \D FileRules pathname contains /home/user/Mail/.swish FileRules pathname contains /home/user/Mail/mhe-index FileRules filename is index
This configuration does not index the folders that hold the results of your searches in ‘+mhe-index’ since they tend to be ephemeral and the original messages are indexed anyway.
If there are any directories you would like to ignore, append lines like the following to config:
FileRules pathname contains /home/user/Mail/scripts
Use the following command line to generate the swish index. Run this daily from cron:
swish-e -c /home/user/Mail/.swish/config
15.1.3 mairix
In the examples below, replace ~/Mail with the path to your MH directory.
First create the directory ~/Mail/.mairix. Then create the file ~/Mail/.mairix/config with the following contents:
base=~/Mail # List of folders that should be indexed. 3 dots at the end means there # are subfolders within the folder mh=archive...:inbox:drafts:news:sent:trash mformat=mh database=~/Mail/.mairix/database
Use the following command line to generate the mairix index. Run this daily from cron:
mairix -f ~/Mail/.mairix/config
15.1.4 namazu
In the examples below, replace /home/user/Mail with the path to your MH directory.
First create the directory /home/user/Mail/.namazu. Then create the file /home/user/Mail/.namazu/mknmzrc with the following contents:
package conf; # Don't remove this line! $ADDRESS = 'user@localhost'; $ALLOW_FILE = "[0-9]*"; $EXCLUDE_PATH = "^/home/user/Mail/(mhe-index|spam)";
This configuration does not index the folders that hold the results of your searches in ‘+mhe-index’ since they tend to be ephemeral and the original messages are indexed anyway.
Use the following command line to generate the namazu index. Run this daily from cron:
mknmz -f /home/user/Mail/.namazu/mknmzrc -O /home/user/Mail/.namazu \
-q /home/user/Mail
15.1.5 pick
This search method does not require any setup.
Read pick(1) or the section
Finding Messages with pick in
the MH book to find out more about how to enter the criteria.
15.1.6 grep
This search method does not require any setup.
Unlike the other search methods, this method does not use the
MH-Search buffer. Instead, you simply enter a regular expression in
the minibuffer. For help in constructing regular expressions, see your
man page for grep.
Next: Limiting Display, Previous: Searching Through Messages, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
16 Viewing Message Threads
MH-E groups messages by threads which are messages that are part of the same discussion and usually all have the same ‘Subject:’ header field. Other ways to organize messages in a folder include limiting (see Limiting Display) or using full-text indexed searches (see Searching Through Messages).
A thread begins with a single message called a root. All replies to the same message are siblings of each other. Any message that has replies to it is an ancestor of those replies.
There are several commands that you can use to navigate and operate on threads.
- T ?
Display cheat sheet for the commands of the current prefix in minibuffer (
mh-prefix-help).- T o
Refile (output) thread into folder (
mh-thread-refile).- T d
Delete thread (
mh-thread-delete).- T t
Toggle threaded view of folder (
mh-toggle-threads).- T n
Display next sibling (
mh-thread-next-sibling).- T p
Display previous sibling (
mh-thread-previous-sibling).- T u
Display ancestor of current message (
mh-thread-ancestor).
The ‘mh-thread’ customization group contains one option.
mh-show-threads-flag¶On means new folders start in threaded mode (default: ‘off’).
Threading large number of messages can be time consuming so the option
mh-show-threads-flag is turned off by default. If you turn on
this option, then threading will be done only if the number of
messages being threaded is less than mh-large-folder. In any
event, threading can be turned on (and off) with the command T t
(mh-toggle-threads).
There are a few commands to help you navigate threads. If you do not
care for the way a particular thread has turned, you can move up the
chain of messages with the command T u
(mh-thread-ancestor. At any point you can use T n
(mh-thread-next-sibling or T p
(mh-thread-previous-sibling) to jump to the next or previous
sibling, skipping the sub-threads. The command T u can also take
a prefix argument to jump to the message that started everything.
There are threaded equivalents for the commands that delete and refile
messages. For example, T o (mh-thread-refile) refiles the
current message and all its children. Similarly, the command T d
(mh-thread-delete) deletes the current message and all its
children. These commands do not refile or delete sibling messages.
See Navigating, for a description of the similar command k
(mh-delete-subject-or-thread).
If you find that threading is too slow, it may be that you have
mh-large-folder set too high. Also, threading is one of the few
features of MH-E that really benefits from compiling. If you haven’t
compiled MH-E, I encourage you to do so48.
Next: Using Sequences, Previous: Viewing Message Threads, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
17 Limiting Display
Another way to organize messages in a folder besides threading (see Viewing Message Threads) or using full-text indexed searches (see Searching Through Messages) is by limiting the folder display to messages that are similar to the current message.
- / ?
Display cheat sheet for the commands of the current prefix in minibuffer (
mh-prefix-help).- / '
Limit to messages in the ‘tick’ sequence (
mh-narrow-to-tick).- / c
Limit to messages with the same ‘Cc:’ field (
mh-narrow-to-cc).- / m
Limit to messages with the same ‘From:’ field (
mh-narrow-to-from).- / g
Limit to range (
mh-narrow-to-range).- / s
Limit to messages with the same ‘Subject:’ field (
mh-narrow-to-subject).- / t
Limit to messages with the same ‘To:’ field (
mh-narrow-to-to).- / w
Remove last restriction (
mh-widen).
All of the limiting commands above refine the display in some way.
The commands / c (mh-narrow-to-cc), / m
(mh-narrow-to-from), / s (mh-narrow-to-subject),
and / t (mh-narrow-to-to) restrict the display to
messages matching the content of the respective field in the current
message. However, you can give any of these a prefix argument to edit
the pick expression used to narrow the view49.
You can also limit the display to messages in the ‘tick’ sequence
with the command / ' (mh-narrow-to-tick).
See Using Sequences, for information on putting message into the
‘tick’ sequence. Use the / g (mh-narrow-to-range)
command to limit the display to messages in a range (see Ranges).
Each limit can be undone in turn with the / w (mh-widen)
command. Give this command a prefix argument to remove all limits.
Next: Dealing With Junk Mail, Previous: Limiting Display, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
18 Using Sequences
For the whole scoop on MH sequences, refer to ‘mh-sequence’(5)50. As you’ve read, several of the MH-E commands can operate on a sequence, which is a shorthand for a range or group of messages. For example, you might want to forward several messages to a friend or colleague. Here’s how to manipulate sequences. These commands are also available in the ‘Sequence’ menu.
- '
Toggle tick mark of range (
mh-toggle-tick).- S ?
Display cheat sheet for the commands of the current prefix in minibuffer (
mh-prefix-help).- S '
Limit to ticked messages (
mh-narrow-to-tick).- S d
Delete range from sequence (
mh-delete-msg-from-seq).- S k
Delete sequence (
mh-delete-seq).- S l
List all sequences in folder (
mh-list-sequences).- S n
Restrict display to messages in sequence (
mh-narrow-to-seq).- S p
Add range to sequence (
mh-put-msg-in-seq).- S s
Display the sequences in which the current message appears (
mh-msg-is-in-seq).- S w
Remove last restriction (
mh-widen).- M-x mh-update-sequences
Flush MH-E’s state out to MH.
The ‘mh-sequences’ customization group contains the options associated with sequences.
mh-refile-preserves-sequences-flag¶On means that sequences are preserved when messages are refiled (default: ‘on’).
mh-tick-seq¶The name of the MH sequence for ticked messages (default: ‘'tick’).
mh-update-sequences-after-mh-show-flag¶On means flush MH sequences to disk after message is shown (default: ‘on’).
mh-allowlist-preserves-sequences-flag¶On means that sequences are preserved when messages are allowlisted (default: ‘on’).
The following hook is available.
mh-unseen-updated-hook¶Hook run after the unseen sequence has been updated (default:
nil).
To place a message in a sequence, use S p
(mh-put-msg-in-seq). Give S p a range and you can add all
the messages in a sequence to another sequence (for example, C-u
S p SourceSequence RET DestSequence RET, see Ranges).
One specific use of the S p command is '
(mh-toggle-tick) which adds messages to the ‘tick’
sequence. This sequence can be viewed later with the F '
(mh-index-ticked-messages) command (see Organizing Your Mail with Folders).
You can customize the option mh-tick-seq if you already use the
‘tick’ sequence for your own use. You can also disable all of the
ticking functions by choosing the ‘Disable Ticking’ item but
there isn’t much advantage to that.
Once you’ve placed some messages in a sequence, you may wish to narrow
the field of view to just those messages in the sequence you’ve
created. To do this, use S n (mh-narrow-to-seq). You are
prompted for the name of the sequence. What this does is show only
those messages that are in the selected sequence in the MH-Folder
buffer. In addition, it limits further MH-E searches to just those
messages. To narrow the view to the messages in the ‘tick’
sequence, use S ' (mh-narrow-to-tick). When you want to
widen the view to all your messages again, use S w
(mh-widen).
You can see which sequences in which a message appears with the
command S s (mh-msg-is-in-seq). Use a prefix argument to
display the sequences in which another message appears (as in C-u
42 S s RET). Or, you can list all sequences in a selected
folder (default is current folder) with S l
(mh-list-sequences). The list appears in a buffer named
*MH-E Sequences* (see Miscellaneous Commands, Variables, and Buffers).
If a message is in any sequence (except
‘Previous-Sequence:’51 and
‘cur’) when it is refiled, then it will still be in those
sequences in the destination folder. If this behavior is not desired,
then turn off the option mh-refile-preserves-sequences-flag.
If you want to remove a message (or range, see Ranges) from a
sequence, use S d (mh-delete-msg-from-seq). If you want
to delete an entire sequence, use S k (mh-delete-seq). In
the latter case you are prompted for the sequence to delete. Note that
this deletes only the sequence, not the messages in the sequence. If
you want to delete the messages, use C-u d (see Reading Your Mail).
Three sequences are maintained internally by MH-E and pushed out to MH
when a message is shown. They include the sequence specified by your
‘Unseen-Sequence:’ profile component, ‘cur’, and the
sequence listed by the option mh-tick-seq which is ‘tick’
by default. If you do not like this behavior, turn off the option
mh-update-sequences-after-mh-show-flag. You can then update the
state manually with the x, q, or M-x
mh-update-sequences commands.
The hook mh-unseen-updated-hook is run after the unseen
sequence has been updated. The variable mh-seen-list can be
used by this hook to obtain the list of messages which were removed
from the unseen sequence.
With the exceptions of S n and S w, the underlying MH
command dealing with sequences is mark52.
Next: Miscellaneous Commands, Variables, and Buffers, Previous: Using Sequences, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
19 Dealing With Junk Mail
Marshall Rose once wrote a paper on MH entitled, How to process 200 messages a day and still get some real work done. This chapter could be entitled, How to process 1000 spams a day and still get some real work done.
We use the terms junk mail and spam interchangeably for any unwanted message which includes spam, viruses, and worms. The opposite of spam is ham. The act of classifying a sender as one who sends junk mail is called blocklisting; the opposite is called allowlisting.
- J ?
Display cheat sheet for the commands of the current prefix in minibuffer (
mh-prefix-help).- J b
Blocklist range as spam (
mh-junk-blocklist).- J a
Allowlist range as ham (
mh-junk-allowlist).mh-spamassassin-identify-spammersIdentify spammers who are repeat offenders.
The following table lists the options from the ‘mh-junk’ customization group.
mh-junk-background¶If on, spam programs are run in background (default: ‘off’).
mh-junk-disposition¶Disposition of junk mail (default: ‘Delete Spam’).
mh-junk-program¶Spam program that MH-E should use (default: ‘Auto-detect’).
The following option in the ‘mh-sequences’ customization group is also available.
mh-allowlist-preserves-sequences-flag¶On means that sequences are preserved when messages are allowlisted (default: ‘on’).
The following hooks are available.
mh-blocklist-msg-hook¶Hook run by J b (
mh-junk-blocklist) after marking each message for blocklisting (default:nil).mh-allowlist-msg-hook¶Hook run by J a (
mh-junk-allowlist) after marking each message for allowlisting (default ‘nil’).
The following faces are available.
MH-E depends on SpamAssassin, bogofilter, or SpamProbe to throw the dreck away. This chapter describes briefly how to configure these programs to work well with MH-E and how to use MH-E’s interface that provides continuing education for these programs.
The default setting of the option mh-junk-program is
‘Auto-detect’ which means that MH-E will automatically choose one
of SpamAssassin, bogofilter, or SpamProbe in that order. If, for
example, you have both SpamAssassin and bogofilter installed and you
want to use bogofilter, then you can set this option to
‘Bogofilter’.
The command J b (mh-junk-blocklist) trains the spam
program in use with the content of the range (see Ranges) and then
handles the message(s) as specified by the option
mh-junk-disposition. By default, this option is set to
‘Delete Spam’ but you can also specify the name of the folder
which is useful for building a corpus of spam for training purposes.
In contrast, the command J a (mh-junk-allowlist)
reclassifies a range of messages (see Ranges) as ham if it were
incorrectly classified as spam. It then refiles the message into the
+inbox folder.
If a message is in any sequence (except ‘Previous-Sequence:’ and
‘cur’) when it is allowlisted, then it will still be in those
sequences in the destination folder. If this behavior is not desired,
then turn off the option mh-allowlist-preserves-sequences-flag.
By default, the programs are run in the foreground, but this can be
slow when junking large numbers of messages. If you have enough memory
or don’t junk that many messages at the same time, you might try
turning on the option mh-junk-background. 53
The following sections discuss the various counter-spam measures that MH-E can work with.
SpamAssassin
SpamAssassin is one of the more popular spam filtering programs. Get it from your local distribution or from the SpamAssassin web site.
To use SpamAssassin, add the following recipes to ~/.procmailrc:
PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin/mh MAILDIR=$HOME/`mhparam Path` # Fight spam with SpamAssassin. :0fw | spamc # Anything with a spam level of 10 or more is junked immediately. :0: * ^X-Spam-Level: .......... /dev/null :0: * ^X-Spam-Status: Yes spam/.
If you don’t use spamc, use ‘spamassassin -P -a’.
Note that one of the recipes above throws away messages with a score greater than or equal to 10. Here’s how you can determine a value that works best for you.
First, run ‘spamassassin -t’ on every mail message in your
archive and use gnumeric to verify that the average plus the
standard deviation of good mail is under 5, the SpamAssassin default
for “spam”.
Using gnumeric, sort the messages by score and view the
messages with the highest score. Determine the score which encompasses
all of your interesting messages and add a couple of points to be
conservative. Add that many dots to the ‘X-Spam-Level:’ header
field above to send messages with that score down the drain.
In the example above, messages with a score of 5–9 are set aside in the ‘+spam’ folder for later review. The major weakness of rules-based filters is a plethora of false positives so it is worthwhile to check.
If SpamAssassin classifies a message incorrectly, or is unsure, you can
use the MH-E commands J b (mh-junk-blocklist) and
J a (mh-junk-allowlist).
The command J b (mh-junk-blocklist) adds a
‘blacklist_from’ entry to ~/spamassassin/user_prefs,
deletes the message, and sends the message to the Razor, so that
others might not see this spam. If the sa-learn command is
available, the message is also recategorized as spam.
The commandJ a (mh-junk-allowlist) adds a
‘whitelist_from’ rule to ‘~/.spamassassin/user_prefs’. If
the sa-learn command is available, the message is also
recategorized as ham.
Over time, you’ll observe that the same host or domain occurs
repeatedly in the ‘blacklist_from’ entries, so you might think
that you could avoid future spam by blocklisting all mail from a
particular domain. The utility function
mh-spamassassin-identify-spammers helps you do precisely that.
This function displays a frequency count of the hosts and domains in
the ‘blacklist_from’ entries from the last blank line in
~/.spamassassin/user_prefs to the end of the file. This
information can be used so that you can replace multiple
‘blacklist_from’ entries with a single wildcard entry such as:
blacklist_from *@*amazingoffersdirect2u.com
In versions of SpamAssassin (2.50 and on) that support a Bayesian
classifier, J b (mh-junk-blocklist) uses the program
sa-learn to recategorize the message as spam. Neither MH-E,
nor SpamAssassin, rebuilds the database after adding words, so you
will need to run ‘sa-learn --rebuild’ periodically. This can be
done by adding the following to your crontab:
0 * * * * sa-learn --rebuild > /dev/null 2>&1
Bogofilter
Bogofilter is a Bayesian spam filtering program. Get it from your local distribution or from the bogofilter web site.
Bogofilter is taught by running:
bogofilter -n < good-message
on every good message, and
bogofilter -s < spam-message
on every spam message. This is called a full training; three other training methods are described in the FAQ that is distributed with bogofilter. Note that most Bayesian filters need 1000 to 5000 of each type of message to start doing a good job.
To use bogofilter, add the following recipes to ~/.procmailrc:
PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin/mh MAILDIR=$HOME/`mhparam Path` # Fight spam with Bogofilter. :0fw | bogofilter -3 -e -p :0: * ^X-Bogosity: Yes, tests=bogofilter spam/. :0: * ^X-Bogosity: Unsure, tests=bogofilter spam/unsure/.
If bogofilter classifies a message incorrectly, or is unsure, you can
use the MH-E commands J b (mh-junk-blocklist) and
J a (mh-junk-allowlist) to update bogofilter’s training.
The Bogofilter FAQ suggests that you run the following occasionally to shrink the database:
bogoutil -d wordlist.db | bogoutil -l wordlist.db.new mv wordlist.db wordlist.db.prv mv wordlist.db.new wordlist.db
The Bogofilter tuning HOWTO describes how you can fine-tune bogofilter.
SpamProbe
SpamProbe is a Bayesian spam filtering program. Get it from your local distribution or from the SpamProbe web site.
To use SpamProbe, add the following recipes to ~/.procmailrc:
PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin/mh MAILDIR=$HOME/`mhparam Path` # Fight spam with SpamProbe. :0 SCORE=| spamprobe receive :0 wf | formail -I "X-SpamProbe: $SCORE" :0: *^X-SpamProbe: SPAM spam/.
If SpamProbe classifies a message incorrectly, you can use the MH-E
commands J b (mh-junk-blocklist) and J a
(mh-junk-allowlist) to update SpamProbe’s training.
Other Things You Can Do
There are a couple of things that you can add to ~/.procmailrc in order to filter out a lot of spam and viruses. The first is to eliminate any message with a Windows executable (which is most likely a virus). The second is to eliminate mail in character sets that you can’t read.
PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin/mh MAILDIR=$HOME/`mhparam Path` # # Filter messages with w32 executables/virii. # # These attachments are base64 and have a TVqQAAMAAAAEAAAA//8AALg # pattern. The string "this program cannot be run in MS-DOS mode" # encoded in base64 is 4fug4AtAnNIbg and helps to avoid false # positives (Roland Smith via Pete from the bogofilter mailing list). # :0 B: * ^Content-Transfer-Encoding:.*base64 * ^TVqQAAMAAAAEAAAA//8AALg * 4fug4AtAnNIbg spam/exe/. # # Filter mail in unreadable character sets (from the Bogofilter FAQ). # UNREADABLE='[^?"]*big5|iso-2022-jp|ISO-2022-KR|euc-kr|gb2312|ks_c_5601-1987' :0: * 1^0 $ ^Subject:.*=\?($UNREADABLE) * 1^0 $ ^Content-Type:.*charset="?($UNREADABLE) spam/unreadable/. :0: * ^Content-Type:.*multipart * B ?? $ ^Content-Type:.*^?.*charset="?($UNREADABLE) spam/unreadable/.
Next: Scan Line Formats, Previous: Dealing With Junk Mail, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
20 Miscellaneous Commands, Variables, and Buffers
This chapter covers the following command and the various MH-E buffers,
mh-version¶Display version information about MH-E and the MH mail handling system.
One command worth noting is M-x mh-version. You can compare the version this command prints to the latest release (see Getting MH-E). The output of M-x mh-version, found in a buffer named *MH-E Info*, should usually be included with any bug report you submit (see Bug Reports).
MH-E Buffers
Besides the MH-Folder, MH-Show, and MH-Letter buffers, MH-E creates several other buffers. They are:
- ‘*MH-E Folders*’ ¶
This buffer contains the output of F l (
mh-list-folders). See Organizing Your Mail with Folders.- ‘*MH-E Help*’ ¶
-
This buffer contains the output of ? (
mh-help) and C-c ? in MH-Letter mode. See Using This Manual. - ‘*MH-E Info*’
This buffer contains the output of M-x mh-version RET.
- ‘*MH-E Log*’
This buffer contains the last 100 lines of the output of the various MH commands.
- ‘*MH-E Mail Delivery*’
This buffer contains the transcript of a mail delivery. See Sending a Message.
- ‘*MH-E Recipients*’ ¶
This buffer contains the output of C-c C-w (
mh-check-whom) and is killed when draft is sent. See Checking Recipients.- ‘*MH-E Sequences*’
This buffer contains the output of S l (
mh-list-sequences). See Using Sequences.- ‘*mh-temp*’
This is a scratch, ephemeral, buffer used by MH-E functions. Note that it is hidden because the first character in the name is a space. You’ll generally not have any need for this buffer.
Next: Reading Mailing Lists Effectively, Previous: Miscellaneous Commands, Variables, and Buffers, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
Appendix A Scan Line Formats
This appendix discusses how MH-E creates, parses, and manipulates scan lines. If you have your own MH scan or inc format files, you can teach MH-E how to handle them, but it isn’t easy as you’ll see.
This table lists the options in the ‘mh-scan-line-formats’ customization group.
mh-adaptive-cmd-note-flag¶On means that the message number width is determined dynamically (default: ‘on’).
mh-scan-format-file¶Specifies the format file to pass to the scan program (default: ‘Use MH-E scan Format’).
mh-scan-prog¶Program used to scan messages (default:
"scan").
There are a couple of caveats when creating your own scan format file.
First, MH-E will not work if your scan lines do not include message
numbers. It will work poorly if you don’t dedicate a column for
showing the current message and notations. It is also best to keep the
first column empty to make room for the cursor and so that text isn’t
obscured by the current message’s overlay arrow when running in a
terminal. You won’t be able to use the option
mh-adaptive-cmd-note-flag or the threading features
(see Viewing Message Threads).
If you’ve created your own format to handle long message numbers,
you’ll be pleased to know you no longer need it since MH-E adapts its
internal format based upon the largest message number if
mh-adaptive-cmd-note-flag is on (the default). If you prefer
fixed-width message numbers, turn off mh-adaptive-cmd-note-flag
and call mh-set-cmd-note with the width specified by your
format file (see mh-scan-format-file). For example, the default
width is 4, so you would use ‘(mh-set-cmd-note 4)’.
The default setting for mh-scan-format-file is ‘Use MH-E
scan Format’. This means that the format string will be taken from
either mh-scan-format-mh or mh-scan-format-nmh depending
on whether MH or nmh (or GNU mailutils MH) is in use. This setting
also enables you to turn on the option
mh-adaptive-cmd-note-flag. You can also set this option to
‘Use Default scan Format’ to get the same output as you would get
if you ran scan from the shell. If you have a format file
that you want MH-E to use but not MH, you can set this option to
‘Specify a scan Format File’ and enter the name of your format
file.
The scan format that MH-E uses when mh-scan-format-file is set
to its default of ‘Use MH-E scan Format’ is held in the variables
mh-scan-format-nmh and mh-scan-format-mh depending on
whether you are using nmh (or GNU mailutils MH) or not. Typically, you
create your own format files rather than modifying these variables.
The value of mh-scan-format-nmh is:
(concat
"%4(msg)"
"%<(cur)+%| %>"
"%<{replied}-"
"%?(nonnull(comp{to}))%<(mymbox{to})t%>"
"%?(nonnull(comp{cc}))%<(mymbox{cc})c%>"
"%?(nonnull(comp{bcc}))%<(mymbox{bcc})b%>"
"%?(nonnull(comp{newsgroups}))n%>"
"%<(zero) %>"
"%02(mon{date})/%02(mday{date})%<{date} %|*%>"
"%<(mymbox{from})%<{to}To:%14(decode(friendly{to}))%>%>"
"%<(zero)%17(decode(friendly{from}))%> "
"%(decode{subject})%<{body}<<%{body}%>")
The setting for mh-scan-format-mh is similar, except that MH
doesn’t have the function decode (which is used to decode RFC
2047 encodings).
These strings are passed to the scan program via the
-format argument. The formats are identical to the defaults
except that additional hints for fontification have been added to the
existing notations in the fifth column (remember that in Emacs, the
columns start at 0). The values of the fifth column, in priority
order, are: ‘-’ if the message has been replied to, ‘t’ if
an address in the ‘To:’ field matches one of the mailboxes of the
current user, ‘c’ if the ‘Cc:’ field matches, ‘b’ if
the ‘Bcc:’ field matches, and ‘n’ if a non-empty
‘Newsgroups:’ field is present.
The name of the program that generates a listing of one line per
message is held in mh-scan-prog (default: "scan").
Unless this variable contains an absolute pathname, it is assumed to
be in the mh-progs directory (see Getting Started). You may
link another program to scan (see ‘mh-profile’(5)) to
produce a different type of listing54.
If you change the format of the scan lines you’ll need to tell MH-E
how to parse the new format. As you will see, quite a lot of variables
are involved to do that. Use M-x apropos RET
mh-scan.*regexp RET to obtain a list of these variables. You
will also have to call mh-set-cmd-note if your notations are
not in column 4 (columns in Emacs start with 0). Note that unlike most
of the user options described in this manual, these are variables and
must be set with setq instead of in a customization buffer. For
help with regular expressions, see
section
Syntax of Regular Expressions in The GNU Emacs Manual.
The first variable has to do with pruning out garbage.
mh-scan-valid-regexp¶This regular expression describes a valid scan line. This is used to eliminate error messages that are occasionally produced by
inc55 orscan(default:"^ *[0-9]").
Next, many variables control how the scan lines are parsed.
mh-scan-body-regexp¶This regular expression matches the message body fragment. Note that the default setting of
mh-folder-font-lock-keywordsexpects this expression to contain at least one parenthesized expression which matches the body text as in the default of"\\(<<\\([^\n]+\\)?\\)". If this regular expression is not correct, the body fragment will not be highlighted with the facemh-folder-body.mh-scan-cur-msg-number-regexp¶This regular expression matches the current message. It must match from the beginning of the line. Note that the default setting of
mh-folder-font-lock-keywordsexpects this expression to contain at least one parenthesized expression which matches the message number as in the default of"^\\( *[0-9]+\\+\\).*". This expression includes the leading space and current message marker ‘+’ within the parenthesis since it looks better to highlight these items as well. The highlighting is done with the facemh-folder-cur-msg-number. This regular expression should be correct as it is needed by non-fontification functions. See alsomh-note-cur.mh-scan-date-regexp¶This regular expression matches a valid date. It must not be anchored to the beginning or the end of the line. Note that the default setting of
mh-folder-font-lock-keywordsexpects this expression to contain only one parenthesized expression which matches the date field as in the default of"\\([0-9][0-9]/[0-9][0-9]\\)". If this regular expression is not correct, the date will not be highlighted with the facemh-folder-date.mh-scan-deleted-msg-regexp¶This regular expression matches deleted messages. It must match from the beginning of the line. Note that the default setting of
mh-folder-font-lock-keywordsexpects this expression to contain at least one parenthesized expression which matches the message number as in the default of"^\\( *[0-9]+\\)D". This expression includes the leading space within the parenthesis since it looks better to highlight it as well. The highlighting is done with the facemh-folder-deleted. This regular expression should be correct as it is needed by non-fontification functions. See alsomh-note-deleted.mh-scan-good-msg-regexp¶This regular expression matches “good” messages. It must match from the beginning of the line. Note that the default setting of
mh-folder-font-lock-keywordsexpects this expression to contain at least one parenthesized expression which matches the message number as in the default of"^\\( *[0-9]+\\)[^D^0-9]". This expression includes the leading space within the parenthesis since it looks better to highlight it as well. The highlighting is done with the facemh-folder-msg-number. This regular expression should be correct as it is needed by non-fontification functions.mh-scan-msg-format-regexp¶This regular expression finds the message number width in a scan format. Note that the message number must be placed in a parenthesized expression as in the default of
"%\\([0-9]*\\)(msg)". This variable is only consulted ifmh-scan-format-fileis set to ‘Use MH-E scan Format’.mh-scan-msg-format-string¶This is a format string for the width of the message number in a scan format. Use ‘0%d’ for zero-filled message numbers. This variable is only consulted if
mh-scan-format-fileis set to ‘Use MH-E scan Format’ (default:"%d").mh-scan-msg-number-regexp¶This regular expression extracts the message number. It must match from the beginning of the line. Note that the message number must be placed in a parenthesized expression as in the default of
"^ *\\([0-9]+\\)".mh-scan-msg-overflow-regexp¶This regular expression matches overflowed message numbers (default:
"^[?0-9][0-9]").mh-scan-msg-search-regexp¶This regular expression matches a particular message. It is a format string; use ‘%d’ to represent the location of the message number within the expression as in the default of
"^[^0-9]*%d[^0-9]".mh-scan-rcpt-regexp¶This regular expression specifies the recipient in messages you sent. Note that the default setting of
mh-folder-font-lock-keywordsexpects this expression to contain two parenthesized expressions. The first is expected to match the ‘To:’ that the default scan format file generates. The second is expected to match the recipient’s name as in the default of"\\(To:\\)\\(..............\\)". If this regular expression is not correct, the ‘To:’ string will not be highlighted with the facemh-folder-toand the recipient will not be highlighted with the facemh-folder-address.mh-scan-refiled-msg-regexp¶This regular expression matches refiled messages. It must match from the beginning of the line. Note that the default setting of
mh-folder-font-lock-keywordsexpects this expression to contain at least one parenthesized expression which matches the message number as in the default of"^\\( *[0-9]+\\)\\^". This expression includes the leading space within the parenthesis since it looks better to highlight it as well. The highlighting is done with the facemh-folder-refiled. This regular expression should be correct as it is needed by non-fontification functions. See alsomh-note-refiled.mh-scan-sent-to-me-sender-regexp¶This regular expression matches messages sent to us. Note that the default setting of
mh-folder-font-lock-keywordsexpects this expression to contain at least two parenthesized expressions. The first should match the fontification hint (seemh-scan-format-nmh) and the second should match the user name as in the default of"^ *[0-9]+.\\([bct]\\).....[ ]*\\(..................\\)". If this regular expression is not correct, the notation hints will not be highlighted with the facemh-mh-folder-sent-to-me-hintand the sender will not be highlighted with the facemh-folder-sent-to-me-sender.mh-scan-subject-regexp¶This regular expression matches the subject. It must match from the beginning of the line. Note that the default setting of ‘mh-folder-font-lock-keywords’ expects this expression to contain at least three parenthesized expressions. The first is expected to match the ‘Re:’ string, if any, and is highlighted with the face
mh-folder-followup. The second matches an optional bracketed number after ‘Re:’, such as in ‘Re[2]:’ (and is thus a sub-expression of the first expression). The third is expected to match the subject line itself which is highlighted with the facemh-folder-subject. For example, the default is"^ *[0-9]+........[ ]*...................
\\([Rr][Ee]\\(\\[[0-9]+\\]\\)?:\\s-*\\)*\\([^<\n]*\\)". This regular expression should be correct as it is needed by non-fontification functions. Note that this example is broken up on two lines for readability, but is actually a single string.
Finally, there are a slew of variables that control how MH-E annotates the scan lines.
mh-cmd-note¶Column for notations (default: 4). This variable should be set with the function
mh-set-cmd-note. This variable may be updated dynamically ifmh-adaptive-cmd-note-flagis on. The following variables contain the notational characters. Note that columns in Emacs start with 0.mh-note-copied¶Messages that have been copied are marked by this character (default:
?C).mh-note-cur¶The current message (in MH, not in MH-E) is marked by this character (default:
?+). See alsomh-scan-cur-msg-number-regexp.mh-note-deleted¶Messages that have been deleted are marked by this character (default:
?D). See alsomh-scan-deleted-msg-regexp.mh-note-dist¶Messages that have been redistributed are marked by this character (default:
?R).mh-note-forw¶Messages that have been forwarded are marked by this character (default:
?F).mh-note-printed¶Messages that have been printed are marked by this character (default:
?P).mh-note-refiled¶Messages that have been refiled are marked by this character (default:
?^). See alsomh-scan-refiled-msg-regexp.mh-note-repl¶Messages that have been replied to are marked by this character (default:
?-).mh-note-seq¶Messages in a user-defined sequence are marked by this character (default:
?%). Messages in the ‘search’ sequence are marked by this character as well.
For example, let’s say I have the following in scan.format which displays the sender, the subject, and the message number. This format places a ‘+’ after the message number for the current message according to MH; it also uses that column for notations.
%20(decode(friendly{from})) %50(decode{subject}) %4(msg)%<(cur)+%| %>
The first thing you have to do is tell MH-E to use this file.
Customize mh-scan-format-file and set its value to ‘Use
Default scan Format’. If you didn’t get already turn off
mh-adaptive-cmd-note-flag, you’ll need to do that first.
Next, tell MH-E what a valid scan line looks like so that you can at least display the output of scan in your MH-Folder buffer.
(setq mh-scan-valid-regexp "[0-9]+[+D^ ]$")
Now, in order to get rid of the ‘Cursor not pointing to message’ message, you need to tell MH-E how to access the message number. You should also see why MH-E requires that you include a message number in the first place.
(setq mh-scan-msg-number-regexp "^.* \\([0-9]+\\)[+D^ ]$") (setq mh-scan-msg-search-regexp " %d[+D^ ]$")
In order to get the next and previous commands working, add this.
(setq mh-scan-good-msg-regexp "^.* \\([0-9]+\\)[+D^ ]$")
Note that the current message isn’t marked with a ‘+’ when moving between the next and previous messages. Here is the code required to get this working.
(set-mh-cmd-note 76) (setq mh-scan-cur-msg-number-regexp "^.* \\([0-9]+\\)\\+$")
Finally, add the following to delete and refile messages.
(setq mh-scan-deleted-msg-regexp "^.* \\([0-9]+\\)D$") (setq mh-scan-refiled-msg-regexp "^.* \\([0-9]+\\)\\^$")
This is just a bare minimum; it’s best to adjust all of the regular expressions to ensure that MH-E and highlighting perform well.
Next: Odds and Ends, Previous: Scan Line Formats, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
Appendix B Reading Mailing Lists Effectively
This appendix explains how to use procmail, which can file mail from mailing lists into folders which can then be read easily with MH-E56. Unfortunately, procmail is no longer recommended due to its security vulnerabilities. Some mailing lists have such high traffic that Gnus must be used and I discuss how to use Gnus side-by-side with MH-E.
First, I’ll describe how to put mail from your mailing lists directly
into an MH folder using procmail. First, add the following
to ~/.procmailrc. While the logging variables aren’t strictly
necessary, they are extremely useful.
[1] # Update PATH so procmail can find myrcvstore, rcvstore and mhparam. [2] PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/mh:/usr/bin/mh:$HOME/bin [3] [4] # Point LOGFILE at the actual log file. [5] LOGFILE=$HOME/.procmail.log [6] [7] # This setting provides just the right amount of information. [8] LOGABSTRACT=all [9] [10] # Uncomment the following line to see how your patterns match. [11] #VERBOSE=yes [12] [13] # Place mail sent to any MH-E mailing list in +mh-e. [14] :0 w: mh-e$LOCKEXT [15] * ^TO.*mh-e-.*@.*sourceforge.net [16] | myrcvstore -create +mh-e
Line 14 creates a lock file in your mail directory based upon the name
of the folder. This is done because rcvstore does not
perform locking. While this lock file will prevent procmail
from writing to a folder concurrently, there is a slight chance that
you might lose a message if you’re performing operations on a folder
at the same time rcvstore is placing a message there. You
have been warned. Now that that disclaimer is out of the way, note
that I’ve been using this set-up for over a decade and haven’t lost
anything to my knowledge57.
Line 16 uses the following script, myrcvstore, to massage the
message as described in the comment and file the message in the given
folder58.
#! /bin/sh # Accepts a message on standard input and passes it through rcvstore # after first passing it through any filters. All arguments are passed # on to rcvstore. # Force the "From user date" to become part of header. One reason this # is done is because the presence of the From field confuses dist so # that dist adds a new header, rather than using the existing header. # Note that this should not be done for any message that goes into a # Gnus incoming file (Gnus will thrown an error) nor should it be # applied to any message that goes to the system mailbox because the # entire mailbox will be incorporated as a single message. formail -c -z -R 'From ' X-Envelope-From: | rcvstore $@
If your version of rcvstore doesn’t add messages to the
‘unseen’ sequence by default, add the following line to your MH
profile:
Unseen-Sequence: unseen
Now view your new messages with the speedbar (see The Speedbar) or with
F n (mh-index-new-messages). See Organizing Your Mail with Folders.
If you’re on a mailing list that is so voluminous that it is impossible to read every message, it usually better to read the mailing list like a newsgroup in a news reader. Emacs has a built-in newsreader called Gnus. The remainder of this appendix talks about how to use Gnus with an MH message store.
This table contains a list of Gnus options that you will have to modify. Note that for them to become accessible, you’ll have to load nnml.el first. This can be done with M-x load-library RET nnml RET.
gnus-secondary-select-methods¶Select the ‘nnml’ value. This select method uses directories for folders and individual files for messages, just like MH. You do not have to set an address.
mail-sources¶Select the ‘Several files in a directory’ value, check the ‘Path’ box and enter ~/Mail to tell Gnus where to find your mail.
message-mail-user-agent¶In order to send mail within Gnus using MH-E, set this option to ‘mail-user-agent’ and set the
mail-user-agentoption to ‘Emacs interface to MH’.nnmail-keep-last-article¶Since Gnus keeps track of which messages you have read, it would be bad if Gnus expired the last message, for example, message 100, and
rcvstoregave the next new message number 1. Gnus would then ignore it since it thinks that you’ve read messages 1–100. Turning on this option ensures that the last message is never removed thereby eliminating this problem.
Next add the following to ~/.procmailrc. If you don’t subscribe to the GnuCash mailing list, substitute one to which you are subscribed.
PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin/mh MAILDIR=$HOME/`mhparam Path` # Place mail sent to the GnuCash mailing list in gnucash.spool, where # Gnus will pick it up. :0: * ^TO.*gnucash.*@.*gnucash.org gnucash.spool
Wait for some messages to appear in gnucash.spool and run Gnus with M-x gnus RET. To view the folder created in the example above, you would tell Gnus about it the first time only with G m gnucash RET nnml RET. In MH-E, this folder is known as ‘+gnucash’.
Next: History of MH-E, Previous: Reading Mailing Lists Effectively, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
Appendix C Odds and Ends
This appendix covers a few topics that don’t fit elsewhere. Here I tell you how to report bugs and how to get on the MH-E mailing lists. I also point out some additional sources of information.
Next: MH-E Mailing Lists, Up: Odds and Ends [Contents][Index]
C.1 Bug Reports
Bug reports should be filed at SourceForge. You need to be a SourceForge user to submit bug reports, but this is easy enough to do that it shouldn’t be a restriction for you. Please include the output of M-x mh-version (see Miscellaneous Commands, Variables, and Buffers) in any bug report you send unless you’re 110% positive we won’t ask for it.
Next: MH FAQ and Support, Previous: Bug Reports, Up: Odds and Ends [Contents][Index]
C.2 MH-E Mailing Lists
There are several mailing lists for MH-E. They are mh-e-users at lists.sourceforge.net, mh-e-announce at lists.sourceforge.net, and mh-e-devel at lists.sourceforge.net. You can subscribe or view the archives at SourceForge. Do not report bugs on these lists; please submit them via SourceForge (see Bug Reports).
Next: Getting MH-E, Previous: MH-E Mailing Lists, Up: Odds and Ends [Contents][Index]
C.3 MH FAQ and Support
The article MH Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) with Answers appears monthly in the newsgroup ‘comp.mail.mh’. While very little is there that deals with MH-E specifically, there is an incredible wealth of material about MH itself which you will find useful.
You can find FAQs on MH-E by searching for labels:support on the Tickets page on SourceForge. If you don’t find the answer to your question, file a ticket and your question will become a new FAQ!
Previous: MH FAQ and Support, Up: Odds and Ends [Contents][Index]
C.4 Getting MH-E
Since MH-E 8.6 was released in 2016, its development migrated to the Emacs repository. MH-E is now only supported in the version of Emacs in which it appears. Old releases of MH-E are still available for download at SourceForge.
After you download and extract the MH-E tarball, read the README file and MH-E-NEWS. These correspond to the release notes and change log mentioned above. The file README contains instructions on installing MH-E. If you’re already running Emacs, please quit that session and start again to load in the new MH-E. Check that you’re running the new version with the command M-x mh-version.
In addition to the mh-e package, the SourceForge site also contains doc and contrib packages. The former is the latest release of this manual, and the latter contains a few contributed packages you might find useful.
Next: GNU Free Documentation License, Previous: Odds and Ends, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
Appendix D History of MH-E
MH-E was originally written by Brian Reid in 1983 and has changed hands several times since then. Jim Larus wanted to do something similar for GNU Emacs, and ended up completely rewriting it that same year. In 1989, Stephen Gildea picked it up and added many improvements. Bill Wohler then took over in 2000 and moved its development to SourceForge. Since 2016, MH-E development occurs within the Emacs repository.
Next: From Jim Larus, Up: History of MH-E [Contents][Index]
D.1 From Brian Reid
One day in 1983 I got the flu and had to stay home from work for three days with nothing to do. I used that time to write MHE. The fundamental idea behind MHE was that it was a “puppeteer” driving the MH programs underneath it. MH had a model that the editor was supposed to run as a sub-process of the mailer, which seemed to me at the time to be the tail wagging the dog. So I turned it around and made the editor drive the MH programs. I made sure that the UCI people (who were maintaining MH at the time) took in my changes and made them stick.
Today, I still use my own version of MHE because I don’t at all like the way that GNU MH-E works and I’ve never gotten to be good enough at hacking Emacs Lisp to make GNU MH-E do what I want. The Gosling-emacs version of MHE and the GNU Emacs version of MH-E have almost nothing in common except similar names. They work differently, have different conceptual models, and have different key bindings59.
Brian Reid, June 1994
Next: From Stephen Gildea, Previous: From Brian Reid, Up: History of MH-E [Contents][Index]
D.2 From Jim Larus
Brian Reid, while at CMU or shortly after going to Stanford wrote a mail reading program called MHE for Gosling Emacs. It had much the same structure as MH-E (i.e., invoked MH programs), though it was simpler and the commands were slightly different. Unfortunately, I no longer have a copy so the differences are lost in the mists of time.
In ’82–83, I was working at BBN and wrote a lot of mlisp code in Gosling Emacs to make it look more like Tennex Emacs. One of the packages that I picked up and improved was Reid’s mail system. In ’83, I went back to Berkeley. About that time, Stallman’s first version of GNU Emacs came out and people started to move to it from Gosling Emacs (as I recall, the transition took a year or two). I decided to port Reid’s MHE and used the mlisp to Emacs Lisp translator that came with GNU Emacs. It did a lousy job and the resulting code didn’t work, so I bit the bullet and rewrote the code by hand (it was a lot smaller and simpler then, so it took only a day or two).
Soon after that, MH-E became part of the standard Emacs distribution and suggestions kept dribbling in for improvements. MH-E soon reached sufficient functionality to keep me happy, but I kept on improving it because I was a graduate student with plenty of time on my hands and it was more fun than my dissertation. In retrospect, the one thing that I regret is not writing any documentation, which seriously limited the use and appeal of the package.
In ’89, I came to Wisconsin as a professor and decided not to work on
MH-E. It was stable, except for minor bugs, and had enough
functionality, so I let it be for a few years. Stephen Gildea of BBN
began to pester me about the bugs, but I ignored them. In 1990, he
went off to the X Consortium, said good bye, and said that he would
now be using xmh. A few months later, he came back and said
that he couldn’t stand xmh and could I put a few more bug fixes
into MH-E. At that point, I had no interest in fixing MH-E, so I gave
the responsibility of maintenance to him and he has done a fine job
since then.
Jim Larus, June 1994
Next: From Bill Wohler, Previous: From Jim Larus, Up: History of MH-E [Contents][Index]
D.3 From Stephen Gildea
In 1987 I went to work for Bolt Beranek and Newman, as Jim had before me. In my previous job, I had been using RMAIL, but as my folders tend to run large, I was frustrated with the speed of RMAIL. However, I stuck with it because I wanted the GNU Emacs interface. I am very familiar and comfortable with the Emacs interface (with just a few modifications of my own) and dislike having to use applications with embedded editors; they never live up to Emacs.
MH is the mail reader of choice at BBN, so I converted to it. Since I didn’t want to give up using an Emacs interface, I started using MH-E. As is my wont, I started hacking on it almost immediately. I first used version 3.4m. One of the first features I added was to treat the folder buffer as a file-visiting buffer: you could lock it, save it, and be warned of unsaved changes when killing it. I also worked to bring its functionality a little closer to RMAIL. Jim Larus was very cooperative about merging in my changes, and my efforts first appeared in version 3.6, distributed with Emacs 18.52 in 1988. Next I decided MH-E was too slow and optimized it a lot. Version, 3.7, distributed with Emacs 18.56 in 1990, was noticeably faster.
When I moved to the X Consortium I became the first person there to not use xmh. (There is now one other engineer there using MH-E.) About this point I took over maintenance of MH-E from Jim and was finally able to add some features Jim hadn’t accepted, such as the backward searching undo. My first release was 3.8 (Emacs 18.58) in 1992.
Now, in 1994, we see a flurry of releases, with both 4.0 and 5.0. Version 4.0 added many new features, including background folder collection and support for composing MIME messages. (Reading MIME messages remains to be done, alas.) While writing this book, Bill Wohler gave MH-E its closest examination ever, uncovering bugs and inconsistencies that required a new major version to fix, and so version 5 was released.
Stephen Gildea, June 1994
Previous: From Stephen Gildea, Up: History of MH-E [Contents][Index]
D.4 From Bill Wohler
The preface originally included the following text which I use to begin my story:
But it’s important to note a brief history of MH-E.
Version 3 was prevalent through the Emacs 18 and early Emacs 19 years. Then Version 4 came out (Emacs 19.23), which introduced several new and changed commands. Next, Version 5.0 was released, which fixed some bugs and incompatibilities, and was incorporated into Emacs 19.29.
After a long break, Stephen handed the reins over to me in 2000. I moved the project to a new site called SourceForge and organized a great team of developers. Our first release in late 2001 was version 6. It appeared around the time of Emacs 21.2 and had menus and tool bar buttons.
Then, indexed searches, improved MIME handling, a speedbar, multiple identities, alias completion, an index view of unseen messages, spam software support, Face and X-Image-URL header field support, Fcc completion, arbitrary range handling, and draft form editing were introduced in the version 7 series around the time of Emacs 21.4 (2004). Still, Emacs itself contained version 5 of MH-E released back in 1994.
Version 8 development was mostly driven by the rewrite of the manual. It also brought GNU mailutils MH support, S/MIME support, picon support, and an improved interface for hiding header fields. The CVS repository was migrated from SourceForge to Savannah (only for those files that were already part of Emacs) and the software was completely reorganized to push back two decades of entropy. Version 8 appeared in Emacs 22.1 in 2006.
Development was then quiet for a couple of years. Emacs 23.1, which is due out in 2009, will contain version 8.1. This version includes a few new features and several bug fixes.
Bill Wohler, August 2008
Next: GNU General Public License, Previous: History of MH-E, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
Appendix E GNU Free Documentation License
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc. https://fsf.org/ Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
- PREAMBLE
The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document free in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others.
This License is a kind of “copyleft”, which means that derivative works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense. It complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft license designed for free software.
We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software, because free software needs free documentation: a free program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the software does. But this License is not limited to software manuals; it can be used for any textual work, regardless of subject matter or whether it is published as a printed book. We recommend this License principally for works whose purpose is instruction or reference.
- APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
This License applies to any manual or other work, in any medium, that contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it can be distributed under the terms of this License. Such a notice grants a world-wide, royalty-free license, unlimited in duration, to use that work under the conditions stated herein. The “Document”, below, refers to any such manual or work. Any member of the public is a licensee, and is addressed as “you”. You accept the license if you copy, modify or distribute the work in a way requiring permission under copyright law.
A “Modified Version” of the Document means any work containing the Document or a portion of it, either copied verbatim, or with modifications and/or translated into another language.
A “Secondary Section” is a named appendix or a front-matter section of the Document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document’s overall subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject. (Thus, if the Document is in part a textbook of mathematics, a Secondary Section may not explain any mathematics.) The relationship could be a matter of historical connection with the subject or with related matters, or of legal, commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position regarding them.
The “Invariant Sections” are certain Secondary Sections whose titles are designated, as being those of Invariant Sections, in the notice that says that the Document is released under this License. If a section does not fit the above definition of Secondary then it is not allowed to be designated as Invariant. The Document may contain zero Invariant Sections. If the Document does not identify any Invariant Sections then there are none.
The “Cover Texts” are certain short passages of text that are listed, as Front-Cover Texts or Back-Cover Texts, in the notice that says that the Document is released under this License. A Front-Cover Text may be at most 5 words, and a Back-Cover Text may be at most 25 words.
A “Transparent” copy of the Document means a machine-readable copy, represented in a format whose specification is available to the general public, that is suitable for revising the document straightforwardly with generic text editors or (for images composed of pixels) generic paint programs or (for drawings) some widely available drawing editor, and that is suitable for input to text formatters or for automatic translation to a variety of formats suitable for input to text formatters. A copy made in an otherwise Transparent file format whose markup, or absence of markup, has been arranged to thwart or discourage subsequent modification by readers is not Transparent. An image format is not Transparent if used for any substantial amount of text. A copy that is not “Transparent” is called “Opaque”.
Examples of suitable formats for Transparent copies include plain ASCII without markup, Texinfo input format, LaTeX input format, SGML or XML using a publicly available DTD, and standard-conforming simple HTML, PostScript or PDF designed for human modification. Examples of transparent image formats include PNG, XCF and JPG. Opaque formats include proprietary formats that can be read and edited only by proprietary word processors, SGML or XML for which the DTD and/or processing tools are not generally available, and the machine-generated HTML, PostScript or PDF produced by some word processors for output purposes only.
The “Title Page” means, for a printed book, the title page itself, plus such following pages as are needed to hold, legibly, the material this License requires to appear in the title page. For works in formats which do not have any title page as such, “Title Page” means the text near the most prominent appearance of the work’s title, preceding the beginning of the body of the text.
The “publisher” means any person or entity that distributes copies of the Document to the public.
A section “Entitled XYZ” means a named subunit of the Document whose title either is precisely XYZ or contains XYZ in parentheses following text that translates XYZ in another language. (Here XYZ stands for a specific section name mentioned below, such as “Acknowledgements”, “Dedications”, “Endorsements”, or “History”.) To “Preserve the Title” of such a section when you modify the Document means that it remains a section “Entitled XYZ” according to this definition.
The Document may include Warranty Disclaimers next to the notice which states that this License applies to the Document. These Warranty Disclaimers are considered to be included by reference in this License, but only as regards disclaiming warranties: any other implication that these Warranty Disclaimers may have is void and has no effect on the meaning of this License.
- VERBATIM COPYING
You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially, provided that this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this License. You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute. However, you may accept compensation in exchange for copies. If you distribute a large enough number of copies you must also follow the conditions in section 3.
You may also lend copies, under the same conditions stated above, and you may publicly display copies.
- COPYING IN QUANTITY
If you publish printed copies (or copies in media that commonly have printed covers) of the Document, numbering more than 100, and the Document’s license notice requires Cover Texts, you must enclose the copies in covers that carry, clearly and legibly, all these Cover Texts: Front-Cover Texts on the front cover, and Back-Cover Texts on the back cover. Both covers must also clearly and legibly identify you as the publisher of these copies. The front cover must present the full title with all words of the title equally prominent and visible. You may add other material on the covers in addition. Copying with changes limited to the covers, as long as they preserve the title of the Document and satisfy these conditions, can be treated as verbatim copying in other respects.
If the required texts for either cover are too voluminous to fit legibly, you should put the first ones listed (as many as fit reasonably) on the actual cover, and continue the rest onto adjacent pages.
If you publish or distribute Opaque copies of the Document numbering more than 100, you must either include a machine-readable Transparent copy along with each Opaque copy, or state in or with each Opaque copy a computer-network location from which the general network-using public has access to download using public-standard network protocols a complete Transparent copy of the Document, free of added material. If you use the latter option, you must take reasonably prudent steps, when you begin distribution of Opaque copies in quantity, to ensure that this Transparent copy will remain thus accessible at the stated location until at least one year after the last time you distribute an Opaque copy (directly or through your agents or retailers) of that edition to the public.
It is requested, but not required, that you contact the authors of the Document well before redistributing any large number of copies, to give them a chance to provide you with an updated version of the Document.
- MODIFICATIONS
You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you release the Modified Version under precisely this License, with the Modified Version filling the role of the Document, thus licensing distribution and modification of the Modified Version to whoever possesses a copy of it. In addition, you must do these things in the Modified Version:
- Use in the Title Page (and on the covers, if any) a title distinct from that of the Document, and from those of previous versions (which should, if there were any, be listed in the History section of the Document). You may use the same title as a previous version if the original publisher of that version gives permission.
- List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors, if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from this requirement.
- State on the Title page the name of the publisher of the Modified Version, as the publisher.
- Preserve all the copyright notices of the Document.
- Add an appropriate copyright notice for your modifications adjacent to the other copyright notices.
- Include, immediately after the copyright notices, a license notice giving the public permission to use the Modified Version under the terms of this License, in the form shown in the Addendum below.
- Preserve in that license notice the full lists of Invariant Sections and required Cover Texts given in the Document’s license notice.
- Include an unaltered copy of this License.
- Preserve the section Entitled “History”, Preserve its Title, and add to it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors, and publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page. If there is no section Entitled “History” in the Document, create one stating the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as given on its Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified Version as stated in the previous sentence.
- Preserve the network location, if any, given in the Document for public access to a Transparent copy of the Document, and likewise the network locations given in the Document for previous versions it was based on. These may be placed in the “History” section. You may omit a network location for a work that was published at least four years before the Document itself, or if the original publisher of the version it refers to gives permission.
- For any section Entitled “Acknowledgements” or “Dedications”, Preserve the Title of the section, and preserve in the section all the substance and tone of each of the contributor acknowledgements and/or dedications given therein.
- Preserve all the Invariant Sections of the Document, unaltered in their text and in their titles. Section numbers or the equivalent are not considered part of the section titles.
- Delete any section Entitled “Endorsements”. Such a section may not be included in the Modified Version.
- Do not retitle any existing section to be Entitled “Endorsements” or to conflict in title with any Invariant Section.
- Preserve any Warranty Disclaimers.
If the Modified Version includes new front-matter sections or appendices that qualify as Secondary Sections and contain no material copied from the Document, you may at your option designate some or all of these sections as invariant. To do this, add their titles to the list of Invariant Sections in the Modified Version’s license notice. These titles must be distinct from any other section titles.
You may add a section Entitled “Endorsements”, provided it contains nothing but endorsements of your Modified Version by various parties—for example, statements of peer review or that the text has been approved by an organization as the authoritative definition of a standard.
You may add a passage of up to five words as a Front-Cover Text, and a passage of up to 25 words as a Back-Cover Text, to the end of the list of Cover Texts in the Modified Version. Only one passage of Front-Cover Text and one of Back-Cover Text may be added by (or through arrangements made by) any one entity. If the Document already includes a cover text for the same cover, previously added by you or by arrangement made by the same entity you are acting on behalf of, you may not add another; but you may replace the old one, on explicit permission from the previous publisher that added the old one.
The author(s) and publisher(s) of the Document do not by this License give permission to use their names for publicity for or to assert or imply endorsement of any Modified Version.
- COMBINING DOCUMENTS
You may combine the Document with other documents released under this License, under the terms defined in section 4 above for modified versions, provided that you include in the combination all of the Invariant Sections of all of the original documents, unmodified, and list them all as Invariant Sections of your combined work in its license notice, and that you preserve all their Warranty Disclaimers.
The combined work need only contain one copy of this License, and multiple identical Invariant Sections may be replaced with a single copy. If there are multiple Invariant Sections with the same name but different contents, make the title of each such section unique by adding at the end of it, in parentheses, the name of the original author or publisher of that section if known, or else a unique number. Make the same adjustment to the section titles in the list of Invariant Sections in the license notice of the combined work.
In the combination, you must combine any sections Entitled “History” in the various original documents, forming one section Entitled “History”; likewise combine any sections Entitled “Acknowledgements”, and any sections Entitled “Dedications”. You must delete all sections Entitled “Endorsements.”
- COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS
You may make a collection consisting of the Document and other documents released under this License, and replace the individual copies of this License in the various documents with a single copy that is included in the collection, provided that you follow the rules of this License for verbatim copying of each of the documents in all other respects.
You may extract a single document from such a collection, and distribute it individually under this License, provided you insert a copy of this License into the extracted document, and follow this License in all other respects regarding verbatim copying of that document.
- AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS
A compilation of the Document or its derivatives with other separate and independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the copyright resulting from the compilation is not used to limit the legal rights of the compilation’s users beyond what the individual works permit. When the Document is included in an aggregate, this License does not apply to the other works in the aggregate which are not themselves derivative works of the Document.
If the Cover Text requirement of section 3 is applicable to these copies of the Document, then if the Document is less than one half of the entire aggregate, the Document’s Cover Texts may be placed on covers that bracket the Document within the aggregate, or the electronic equivalent of covers if the Document is in electronic form. Otherwise they must appear on printed covers that bracket the whole aggregate.
- TRANSLATION
Translation is considered a kind of modification, so you may distribute translations of the Document under the terms of section 4. Replacing Invariant Sections with translations requires special permission from their copyright holders, but you may include translations of some or all Invariant Sections in addition to the original versions of these Invariant Sections. You may include a translation of this License, and all the license notices in the Document, and any Warranty Disclaimers, provided that you also include the original English version of this License and the original versions of those notices and disclaimers. In case of a disagreement between the translation and the original version of this License or a notice or disclaimer, the original version will prevail.
If a section in the Document is Entitled “Acknowledgements”, “Dedications”, or “History”, the requirement (section 4) to Preserve its Title (section 1) will typically require changing the actual title.
- TERMINATION
You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Document except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute it is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.
However, if you cease all violation of this License, then your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated (a) provisionally, unless and until the copyright holder explicitly and finally terminates your license, and (b) permanently, if the copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by some reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation.
Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice.
Termination of your rights under this section does not terminate the licenses of parties who have received copies or rights from you under this License. If your rights have been terminated and not permanently reinstated, receipt of a copy of some or all of the same material does not give you any rights to use it.
- FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE
The Free Software Foundation may publish new, revised versions of the GNU Free Documentation License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
Each version of the License is given a distinguishing version number. If the Document specifies that a particular numbered version of this License “or any later version” applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that specified version or of any later version that has been published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation. If the Document does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation. If the Document specifies that a proxy can decide which future versions of this License can be used, that proxy’s public statement of acceptance of a version permanently authorizes you to choose that version for the Document.
- RELICENSING
“Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site” (or “MMC Site”) means any World Wide Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works. A public wiki that anybody can edit is an example of such a server. A “Massive Multiauthor Collaboration” (or “MMC”) contained in the site means any set of copyrightable works thus published on the MMC site.
“CC-BY-SA” means the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license published by Creative Commons Corporation, a not-for-profit corporation with a principal place of business in San Francisco, California, as well as future copyleft versions of that license published by that same organization.
“Incorporate” means to publish or republish a Document, in whole or in part, as part of another Document.
An MMC is “eligible for relicensing” if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008.
The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC contained in the site under CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC is eligible for relicensing.
ADDENDUM: How to use this License for your documents
To use this License in a document you have written, include a copy of the License in the document and put the following copyright and license notices just after the title page:
Copyright (C) year your name. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled ``GNU Free Documentation License''.
If you have Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts and Back-Cover Texts, replace the “with…Texts.” line with this:
with the Invariant Sections being list their titles, with
the Front-Cover Texts being list, and with the Back-Cover Texts
being list.
If you have Invariant Sections without Cover Texts, or some other combination of the three, merge those two alternatives to suit the situation.
If your document contains nontrivial examples of program code, we recommend releasing these examples in parallel under your choice of free software license, such as the GNU General Public License, to permit their use in free software.
Next: Key (Character) Index, Previous: GNU Free Documentation License, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
Appendix F GNU General Public License
Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. https://fsf.org/ Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Preamble
The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.
The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program—to make sure it remains free software for all its users. We, the Free Software Foundation, use the GNU General Public License for most of our software; it applies also to any other work released this way by its authors. You can apply it to your programs, too.
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.
To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others.
For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.
Developers that use the GNU GPL protect your rights with two steps: (1) assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer you this License giving you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify it.
For the developers’ and authors’ protection, the GPL clearly explains that there is no warranty for this free software. For both users’ and authors’ sake, the GPL requires that modified versions be marked as changed, so that their problems will not be attributed erroneously to authors of previous versions.
Some devices are designed to deny users access to install or run modified versions of the software inside them, although the manufacturer can do so. This is fundamentally incompatible with the aim of protecting users’ freedom to change the software. The systematic pattern of such abuse occurs in the area of products for individuals to use, which is precisely where it is most unacceptable. Therefore, we have designed this version of the GPL to prohibit the practice for those products. If such problems arise substantially in other domains, we stand ready to extend this provision to those domains in future versions of the GPL, as needed to protect the freedom of users.
Finally, every program is threatened constantly by software patents. States should not allow patents to restrict development and use of software on general-purpose computers, but in those that do, we wish to avoid the special danger that patents applied to a free program could make it effectively proprietary. To prevent this, the GPL assures that patents cannot be used to render the program non-free.
The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow.
TERMS AND CONDITIONS
- Definitions.
“This License” refers to version 3 of the GNU General Public License.
“Copyright” also means copyright-like laws that apply to other kinds of works, such as semiconductor masks.
“The Program” refers to any copyrightable work licensed under this License. Each licensee is addressed as “you”. “Licensees” and “recipients” may be individuals or organizations.
To “modify” a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a “modified version” of the earlier work or a work “based on” the earlier work.
A “covered work” means either the unmodified Program or a work based on the Program.
To “propagate” a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a computer or modifying a private copy. Propagation includes copying, distribution (with or without modification), making available to the public, and in some countries other activities as well.
To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.
An interactive user interface displays “Appropriate Legal Notices” to the extent that it includes a convenient and prominently visible feature that (1) displays an appropriate copyright notice, and (2) tells the user that there is no warranty for the work (except to the extent that warranties are provided), that licensees may convey the work under this License, and how to view a copy of this License. If the interface presents a list of user commands or options, such as a menu, a prominent item in the list meets this criterion.
- Source Code.
The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of a work.
A “Standard Interface” means an interface that either is an official standard defined by a recognized standards body, or, in the case of interfaces specified for a particular programming language, one that is widely used among developers working in that language.
The “System Libraries” of an executable work include anything, other than the work as a whole, that (a) is included in the normal form of packaging a Major Component, but which is not part of that Major Component, and (b) serves only to enable use of the work with that Major Component, or to implement a Standard Interface for which an implementation is available to the public in source code form. A “Major Component”, in this context, means a major essential component (kernel, window system, and so on) of the specific operating system (if any) on which the executable work runs, or a compiler used to produce the work, or an object code interpreter used to run it.
The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. However, it does not include the work’s System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work. For example, Corresponding Source includes interface definition files associated with source files for the work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require, such as by intimate data communication or control flow between those subprograms and other parts of the work.
The Corresponding Source need not include anything that users can regenerate automatically from other parts of the Corresponding Source.
The Corresponding Source for a work in source code form is that same work.
- Basic Permissions.
All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met. This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program. The output from running a covered work is covered by this License only if the output, given its content, constitutes a covered work. This License acknowledges your rights of fair use or other equivalent, as provided by copyright law.
You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force. You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having them make modifications exclusively for you, or provide you with facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not control copyright. Those thus making or running the covered works for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you.
Conveying under any other circumstances is permitted solely under the conditions stated below. Sublicensing is not allowed; section 10 makes it unnecessary.
- Protecting Users’ Legal Rights From Anti-Circumvention Law.
No covered work shall be deemed part of an effective technological measure under any applicable law fulfilling obligations under article 11 of the WIPO copyright treaty adopted on 20 December 1996, or similar laws prohibiting or restricting circumvention of such measures.
When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work’s users, your or third parties’ legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures.
- Conveying Verbatim Copies.
You may convey verbatim copies of the Program’s source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.
You may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee.
- Conveying Modified Source Versions.
You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
- The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.
- The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License and any conditions added under section 7. This requirement modifies the requirement in section 4 to “keep intact all notices”.
- You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.
- If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices; however, if the Program has interactive interfaces that do not display Appropriate Legal Notices, your work need not make them do so.
A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation’s users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.
- Conveying Non-Source Forms.
You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways:
- Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by the Corresponding Source fixed on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange.
- Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.
- Convey individual copies of the object code with a copy of the written offer to provide the Corresponding Source. This alternative is allowed only occasionally and noncommercially, and only if you received the object code with such an offer, in accord with subsection 6b.
- Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. You need not require recipients to copy the Corresponding Source along with the object code. If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source. Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements.
- Convey the object code using peer-to-peer transmission, provided you inform other peers where the object code and Corresponding Source of the work are being offered to the general public at no charge under subsection 6d.
A separable portion of the object code, whose source code is excluded from the Corresponding Source as a System Library, need not be included in conveying the object code work.
A “User Product” is either (1) a “consumer product”, which means any tangible personal property which is normally used for personal, family, or household purposes, or (2) anything designed or sold for incorporation into a dwelling. In determining whether a product is a consumer product, doubtful cases shall be resolved in favor of coverage. For a particular product received by a particular user, “normally used” refers to a typical or common use of that class of product, regardless of the status of the particular user or of the way in which the particular user actually uses, or expects or is expected to use, the product. A product is a consumer product regardless of whether the product has substantial commercial, industrial or non-consumer uses, unless such uses represent the only significant mode of use of the product.
“Installation Information” for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.
If you convey an object code work under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product, and the conveying occurs as part of a transaction in which the right of possession and use of the User Product is transferred to the recipient in perpetuity or for a fixed term (regardless of how the transaction is characterized), the Corresponding Source conveyed under this section must be accompanied by the Installation Information. But this requirement does not apply if neither you nor any third party retains the ability to install modified object code on the User Product (for example, the work has been installed in ROM).
The requirement to provide Installation Information does not include a requirement to continue to provide support service, warranty, or updates for a work that has been modified or installed by the recipient, or for the User Product in which it has been modified or installed. Access to a network may be denied when the modification itself materially and adversely affects the operation of the network or violates the rules and protocols for communication across the network.
Corresponding Source conveyed, and Installation Information provided, in accord with this section must be in a format that is publicly documented (and with an implementation available to the public in source code form), and must require no special password or key for unpacking, reading or copying.
- Additional Terms.
“Additional permissions” are terms that supplement the terms of this License by making exceptions from one or more of its conditions. Additional permissions that are applicable to the entire Program shall be treated as though they were included in this License, to the extent that they are valid under applicable law. If additional permissions apply only to part of the Program, that part may be used separately under those permissions, but the entire Program remains governed by this License without regard to the additional permissions.
When you convey a copy of a covered work, you may at your option remove any additional permissions from that copy, or from any part of it. (Additional permissions may be written to require their own removal in certain cases when you modify the work.) You may place additional permissions on material, added by you to a covered work, for which you have or can give appropriate copyright permission.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms:
- Disclaiming warranty or limiting liability differently from the terms of sections 15 and 16 of this License; or
- Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it; or
- Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways as different from the original version; or
- Limiting the use for publicity purposes of names of licensors or authors of the material; or
- Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some trade names, trademarks, or service marks; or
- Requiring indemnification of licensors and authors of that material by anyone who conveys the material (or modified versions of it) with contractual assumptions of liability to the recipient, for any liability that these contractual assumptions directly impose on those licensors and authors.
All other non-permissive additional terms are considered “further restrictions” within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term. If a license document contains a further restriction but permits relicensing or conveying under this License, you may add to a covered work material governed by the terms of that license document, provided that the further restriction does not survive such relicensing or conveying.
If you add terms to a covered work in accord with this section, you must place, in the relevant source files, a statement of the additional terms that apply to those files, or a notice indicating where to find the applicable terms.
Additional terms, permissive or non-permissive, may be stated in the form of a separately written license, or stated as exceptions; the above requirements apply either way.
- Termination.
You may not propagate or modify a covered work except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to propagate or modify it is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License (including any patent licenses granted under the third paragraph of section 11).
However, if you cease all violation of this License, then your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated (a) provisionally, unless and until the copyright holder explicitly and finally terminates your license, and (b) permanently, if the copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by some reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation.
Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice.
Termination of your rights under this section does not terminate the licenses of parties who have received copies or rights from you under this License. If your rights have been terminated and not permanently reinstated, you do not qualify to receive new licenses for the same material under section 10.
- Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.
You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.
- Automatic Licensing of Downstream Recipients.
Each time you convey a covered work, the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensors, to run, modify and propagate that work, subject to this License. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties with this License.
An “entity transaction” is a transaction transferring control of an organization, or substantially all assets of one, or subdividing an organization, or merging organizations. If propagation of a covered work results from an entity transaction, each party to that transaction who receives a copy of the work also receives whatever licenses to the work the party’s predecessor in interest had or could give under the previous paragraph, plus a right to possession of the Corresponding Source of the work from the predecessor in interest, if the predecessor has it or can get it with reasonable efforts.
You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License, and you may not initiate litigation (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any patent claim is infringed by making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the Program or any portion of it.
- Patents.
A “contributor” is a copyright holder who authorizes use under this License of the Program or a work on which the Program is based. The work thus licensed is called the contributor’s “contributor version”.
A contributor’s “essential patent claims” are all patent claims owned or controlled by the contributor, whether already acquired or hereafter acquired, that would be infringed by some manner, permitted by this License, of making, using, or selling its contributor version, but do not include claims that would be infringed only as a consequence of further modification of the contributor version. For purposes of this definition, “control” includes the right to grant patent sublicenses in a manner consistent with the requirements of this License.
Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor’s essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version.
In the following three paragraphs, a “patent license” is any express agreement or commitment, however denominated, not to enforce a patent (such as an express permission to practice a patent or covenant not to sue for patent infringement). To “grant” such a patent license to a party means to make such an agreement or commitment not to enforce a patent against the party.
If you convey a covered work, knowingly relying on a patent license, and the Corresponding Source of the work is not available for anyone to copy, free of charge and under the terms of this License, through a publicly available network server or other readily accessible means, then you must either (1) cause the Corresponding Source to be so available, or (2) arrange to deprive yourself of the benefit of the patent license for this particular work, or (3) arrange, in a manner consistent with the requirements of this License, to extend the patent license to downstream recipients. “Knowingly relying” means you have actual knowledge that, but for the patent license, your conveying the covered work in a country, or your recipient’s use of the covered work in a country, would infringe one or more identifiable patents in that country that you have reason to believe are valid.
If, pursuant to or in connection with a single transaction or arrangement, you convey, or propagate by procuring conveyance of, a covered work, and grant a patent license to some of the parties receiving the covered work authorizing them to use, propagate, modify or convey a specific copy of the covered work, then the patent license you grant is automatically extended to all recipients of the covered work and works based on it.
A patent license is “discriminatory” if it does not include within the scope of its coverage, prohibits the exercise of, or is conditioned on the non-exercise of one or more of the rights that are specifically granted under this License. You may not convey a covered work if you are a party to an arrangement with a third party that is in the business of distributing software, under which you make payment to the third party based on the extent of your activity of conveying the work, and under which the third party grants, to any of the parties who would receive the covered work from you, a discriminatory patent license (a) in connection with copies of the covered work conveyed by you (or copies made from those copies), or (b) primarily for and in connection with specific products or compilations that contain the covered work, unless you entered into that arrangement, or that patent license was granted, prior to 28 March 2007.
Nothing in this License shall be construed as excluding or limiting any implied license or other defenses to infringement that may otherwise be available to you under applicable patent law.
- No Surrender of Others’ Freedom.
If conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot convey a covered work so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not convey it at all. For example, if you agree to terms that obligate you to collect a royalty for further conveying from those to whom you convey the Program, the only way you could satisfy both those terms and this License would be to refrain entirely from conveying the Program.
- Use with the GNU Affero General Public License.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the special requirements of the GNU Affero General Public License, section 13, concerning interaction through a network will apply to the combination as such.
- Revised Versions of this License.
The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the GNU General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.
Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies that a certain numbered version of the GNU General Public License “or any later version” applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that numbered version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of the GNU General Public License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.
If the Program specifies that a proxy can decide which future versions of the GNU General Public License can be used, that proxy’s public statement of acceptance of a version permanently authorizes you to choose that version for the Program.
Later license versions may give you additional or different permissions. However, no additional obligations are imposed on any author or copyright holder as a result of your choosing to follow a later version.
- Disclaimer of Warranty.
THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
- Limitation of Liability.
IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MODIFIES AND/OR CONVEYS THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
- Interpretation of Sections 15 and 16.
If the disclaimer of warranty and limitation of liability provided above cannot be given local legal effect according to their terms, reviewing courts shall apply local law that most closely approximates an absolute waiver of all civil liability in connection with the Program, unless a warranty or assumption of liability accompanies a copy of the Program in return for a fee.
END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS
How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs
If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms.
To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively state the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least the “copyright” line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.
one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does. Copyright (C) year name of author This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.
If the program does terminal interaction, make it output a short notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode:
program Copyright (C) year name of author This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type ‘show w’. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; type ‘show c’ for details.
The hypothetical commands ‘show w’ and ‘show c’ should show the appropriate parts of the General Public License. Of course, your program’s commands might be different; for a GUI interface, you would use an “about box”.
You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or school, if any, to sign a “copyright disclaimer” for the program, if necessary. For more information on this, and how to apply and follow the GNU GPL, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
The GNU General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General Public License instead of this License. But first, please read https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html.
Next: Command Index, Previous: GNU General Public License, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
Key (Character) Index
| Jump to: | !
'
,
.
/
:
;
>
?
|
B C D E F G I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V X |
|---|
| Jump to: | !
'
,
.
/
:
;
>
?
|
B C D E F G I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V X |
|---|
Next: Option (Variable) Index, Previous: Key (Character) Index, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
Command Index
| Jump to: | A B C D F G H I K M N O P S T |
|---|
| Jump to: | A B C D F G H I K M N O P S T |
|---|
Next: Concept Index, Previous: Command Index, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
Option (Variable) Index
| Jump to: | E G M N P R S T |
|---|
| Jump to: | E G M N P R S T |
|---|
Previous: Option (Variable) Index, Up: The MH-E Manual [Contents][Index]
Concept Index
| Jump to: | *
+
.
/
~
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y |
|---|
| Jump to: | *
+
.
/
~
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y |
|---|
Footnotes
(1)
Version 8.6 of MH-E appeared in Emacs 24.4. It is compatible with MH versions 6.8.4 and higher, all versions of nmh, and GNU mailutils 1.0 and higher
(2)
In very old versions of MH-E, you may get the error message, ‘Cannot find the commands `inc' and `mhl' and the file `components'’ if MH-E can’t find MH. In this case, you need to update MH-E, and you may need to install MH too. However, newer versions of MH-E are better at finding MH if it is on your system.
(3)
See the section Setting Up MH in the MH book.
(4)
The keys mentioned in these chapters refer to the default key bindings. If you’ve changed the bindings, refer to the command summaries at the beginning of each chapter for a mapping between default key bindings and function names.
(5)
A mode changes Emacs to make it easier to edit a particular type of text.
(6)
If you’re running Emacs under the X Window System, then you would also see a menu bar and a tool bar. I’ve left out the menu bar and tool bar in all of the example screens.
(7)
You can
get quick help for the commands used most often with C-c ? or
more complete help with the C-h m (describe-mode)
command.
(8)
See the section Reading Mail: inc show next prev in the MH book.
(9)
See the section Find and Specify with scan pick Ranges Sequences in the MH book.
(10)
This help appears in a buffer called *MH-E Help* (see Miscellaneous Commands, Variables, and Buffers).
(11)
The The GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual should be available via the Info system by typing C-h i m Emacs Lisp RET.
(12)
If you want
to see your old mail as well, use F r to pull all your messages
into MH-E. Or, give a prefix argument to mh-rmail so it will
prompt you for folder to visit like F v (for example, C-u
M-x mh-rmail RET bob RET). See Organizing Your Mail with Folders.
(13)
For more information, see https://quimby.gnus.org/circus/face/.
(14)
The
display of this field requires the
uncompface program.
(15)
The display of the images
requires the wget program to fetch the image and the convert
program from the ImageMagick suite.
(16)
See the section Reading Mail: inc show next prev in the MH book.
(17)
See the section Reading MIME Mail in the MH book.
(18)
You
can call them directly from Emacs if you’re running the X Window
System: type M-! xterm -e mhshow message-number. You can
leave out the ‘xterm -e’ if you use mhlist or
mhstore.
(19)
This plumbing is the ‘Content-Disposition:’ header field.
(20)
See the section Bursting Messages in the MH book.
(21)
MIME Security with OpenPGP is documented in RFC 3156. However, MH-E can also decrypt old-style PGP messages that are not in MIME format.
(22)
Unfortunately in the current version, the validation process doesn’t display a message so it appears that MH-E has hung. We hope that this will be fixed in the future.
(23)
See the section Using mhl in the MH book.
(24)
In previous versions of MH-E,
this option suppressed the confirmation in mh-kill-folder.
Since this kept most users from setting this option,
mh-kill-folder was modified in version 6.0 to always ask for
confirmation subject to mh-kill-folder-suppress-prompt-functions.
See Organizing Your Mail with Folders.
(25)
Stephen Gildea’s favorite binding is (global-set-key "\C-cr" 'mh-rmail).
(26)
See the sections Your Current Folder: folder and Moving and Linking Messages: refile in the MH book.
(27)
For you Emacs wizards, this is implemented as an Emacs minor mode.
(28)
See the section Sorting Messages: sortm in the MH book.
(29)
I highly recommend that you use a draft
folder so that you can edit several drafts in parallel. To do so,
create a folder named ‘+drafts’ for example, and add the profile
component ‘Draft-Folder: drafts’ (see mh-profile(5)).
(30)
Actually, because
MH-Letter mode inherits from Mail mode, the hooks
text-mode-hook and mail-mode-hook are run (in that
order) before mh-letter-mode-hook.
(31)
See the section Replying to Messages: repl in the MH book.
(32)
See the section Forwarding Messages: forw in the MH book.
(33)
See the section Distributing Messages with dist in the MH book.
(34)
See the section Sending Some Mail: comp send in the MH book.
(35)
If you’d rather have the header cleaned up, use C-u r instead of r when replying (see Replying to Mail).
(36)
In the past you would use this setting
and set mail-citation-hook to ‘supercite’, but this usage
is now deprecated in favor of the ‘Invoke supercite’ setting.
(37)
Supercite is a full-bodied, full-featured, citation package that comes standard with Emacs.
(38)
MIME is defined in RFC 2045.
(39)
See the section Sending MIME Mail in the MH book.
(40)
See the section Composing in The Emacs MIME Manual.
(41)
Use C-c C-e
(mh-mh-to-mime) if you’re using MH-style directives.
(42)
See the section Sending MIME Mail in the MH book.
(43)
See the section What now?—and the whatnow Program in the MH book.
(44)
See the section Sending Some Mail: comp send in the MH book.
(45)
See the section MH Aliases in the MH book.
(46)
‘Mail-Followup-To:’ is supported by nmh.
(47)
See the section Searching for Sequences with flist in the MH book.
(48)
If you’re not sure if
MH-E has been byte-compiled, you could try running ‘locate
mh-thread.elc’ or otherwise find MH-E on your system and ensure that
mh-thread.elc exists. If you have multiple versions and you
find that one is compiled but the other is not, then go into your
*scratch* buffer in Emacs, enter load-path C-j, and
ensure that the byte-compiled version appears first in the
load-path. If you find that MH-E is not compiled and you
installed MH-E yourself, please refer to the installation directions
in the file README in the distribution.
(49)
See
pick(1) or the section
Finding Messages with pick in
the MH book.
(50)
See the section More About Sequences in the MH book.
(51)
See ‘mh-profile’(5)).
(52)
See the section Make Message Bookmarks with mark in the MH book.
(53)
Note that
the option mh-junk-background is used as the destination
argument in the call to call-process. Therefore, turning on
this option means setting its value to ‘0’. You can also set its
value to ‘t’ to direct the programs’ output to the *MH-E
Log* buffer; this may be useful for debugging.
(54)
See the section Find and Specify with scan pick Ranges Sequences in the MH book.
(55)
See the section Reading Mail: inc show next prev in the MH book.
(56)
The MH equivalent, slocal,
can be used as well, but procmail was more flexible and more packages
exist for procmail than for slocal.
(57)
See
Savannah issue #4361 to see if rcvstore locking is still an
issue.
(58)
The ‘-create’ argument wasn’t always the default
to rcvstore.
(59)
After reading this article, I questioned Brian about his version of MHE, and received some great ideas for improving MH-E such as a dired-like method of selecting folders; and removing the prompting when sending mail, filling in the blanks in the draft buffer instead. I passed them on to Stephen Gildea, the current maintainer, and he was excited about the ideas as well. Perhaps one day, MH-E will again resemble MHE (draft form editing was introduced in version 7.4).