36.4.4 Mail Mode Miscellany

C-c C-t

Move to the beginning of the message body text (mail-text).

C-c C-w

Insert the file ~/.signature at the end of the message text (mail-signature).

C-c C-i file <RET>

Insert the contents of file at the end of the outgoing message (mail-attach-file).

M-x ispell-message

Perform spelling correction on the message text, but not on citations from other messages.

C-c C-t (mail-text) moves point to just after the header separator line—that is, to the beginning of the message body text.

C-c C-w (mail-signature) adds a standard piece of text at the end of the message to say more about who you are. The text comes from the file ~/.signature in your home directory. To insert your signature automatically, set the variable mail-signature to t; after that, starting a mail message automatically inserts the contents of your ~/.signature file. If you want to omit your signature from a particular message, delete it from the buffer before you send the message.

You can also set mail-signature to a string; then that string is inserted automatically as your signature when you start editing a message to send. If you set it to some other Lisp expression, the expression is evaluated each time, and its value (which should be a string) specifies the signature.

You can do spelling correction on the message text you have written with the command M-x ispell-message. If you have yanked an incoming message into the outgoing draft, this command skips what was yanked, but it checks the text that you yourself inserted. (It looks for indentation or mail-yank-prefix to distinguish the cited lines from your input.) See Spelling.

To include a file in the outgoing message, you can use C-x i, the usual command to insert a file in the current buffer. But it is often more convenient to use a special command, C-c C-i (mail-attach-file). This command inserts the file contents at the end of the buffer, after your signature if any, with a delimiter line that includes the file name. Note that this is not a MIME attachment.

Turning on Mail mode (which C-x m does automatically) runs the normal hooks text-mode-hook and mail-mode-hook. Initializing a new outgoing message runs the normal hook mail-setup-hook; if you want to add special fields to your mail header or make other changes to the appearance of the mail buffer, use that hook. See Hooks.

The main difference between these hooks is just when they are invoked. Whenever you type M-x mail, mail-mode-hook runs as soon as the ‘*mail*’ buffer is created. Then the mail-setup function inserts the default contents of the buffer. After these default contents are inserted, mail-setup-hook runs.