🚀 go-pugleaf

To join the clamour that Jim Prescott, Kathy Vincent, and Xev Gittler have
been raising about including messages into replies:

There are a number of ways to do this in a number of different mailers:

In /bin/mail, the ugly old puppy from AT&T, you can't really do much of
anything, 'cause the original version doesn't have ANY '~' escape chars.
You would have to save the message you're replying to in a file, compose 
the message within an editor started up explicitly, then mail it off
with an invocation like "/bin/mail user@host < FILENAME".  Blech.

In Berkeley Mail there are two different ways to include the text of a
message while composing another.  You can use either ~f to include either
a single message or set of messages *untouched*, or you can use ~m (but
only if you're sending mail as part of being in the mailer already) which
will do the same thing, but prepend each line with a TAB.  From that point,
as has been pointed out, you can simply ~v or ~o EDITOR to invoke your
favorite editor to continue...

In MH you can diddle with the options to "repl" and get the functionality 
you want - I don't know the internals that well, I'm afraid, and the man 
pages have crumbled and faded due to lack of use.

In Elm (you knew this was coming, right?) there are actually lots of
choices - if you're in the builtin editor it'll emulate the behaviour
of the Berkeley Mailer, so ~f and ~r will work, the enhancements being
that 1. It actually calls a program called "readmsg", so you could,
for example, include a message except for the headers with "~r -n 4"
2. It uses a variable in your ".elmrc" called "prefix" which can be
set to any arbitrary string.  The default is "> ".  If you're in any
other editor, you can always invoke "readmsg" to read in the message
(and without an argument it'll default to the message you're currently
answering, if any).  So, for example, if you're in vi, you could read
in the message containing the string "this is a test" by issuing:

!!readmsg this is a test

And then adding the prefix on the fly with:

	:g/^/s//> /

(each line will be prefixed by "> " this way).  You could also have
the message prefixed as it is read in by:

!!readmsg this is a test | sed 's/^/> /'

Other mailers...uhhh...I guess those are the major ones there.  I'd
be suprised if you couldn't do this sort of thing in rmail, the mailer
that lives in Emacs.  The AT&T Mail program (PMX/Term) probably does
NOT have this functionality.  MUSH (the Mail Users SHell from Dan
Heller of Island Graphics) certainly has this functionality, doesn't 
it, Dan???  *grin*

				'nuf about this already!!

					-- Dave Taylor

ps: as far as it not needing the information, and having software that
    does matching of messages and replies, we've still got to wait a
    few years for this - at least at the resolution of lines or sentences
    (having the messages themselves is pretty simple, but it doesn't have
    sufficient resolution to be useful).  We can talk about this for
    days, actually...