🚀 go-pugleaf

If you are thinking of using emacs -- just for the purpose of an
e-mail editor -- you should consider one of the smaller e-macs type
editors.  I'm using e-macs now, and its a great editor, but the source
is huge and its easy for a non-computer jock (and jocks too) to get
lost in the mutitudious features.

I've got jove (Jonathon [Payne's] own version of emacs) and find it
very useful.  It works with the VT100 arrow keys if you want, and
should be able to work with any ESC O or ESC [ sequence sent by the
keypad (you'll need to make sure that the keypad is in the correct
mode).

Jove is probably 1/10 the size of GNU emacs.  you can still set up
your own bindings, you can have it go into auto-fill mode
automatically, it even has a spell checker if they want (but here it
isn't as friendly as GNU emacs).  If you set it up correctly, I
believe that anyone can hack out a letter on it.  

A full implementation of emacs is overkill for your purpose.