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’12. 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’3 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’.
[1] If you'd rather have the header cleaned up, use C-u r instead of r when replying (see Replying).
[2] 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.
[3] Supercite is a full-bodied, full-featured, citation package that comes standard with Emacs.