35.4.3 Citing Mail

Mail mode also has commands for yanking or citing all or part of a message that you are replying to. These commands are active only when you started sending a message using an Rmail command.

C-c C-y

Yank the selected message from Rmail (mail-yank-original).

C-c C-r

Yank the region from the Rmail buffer (mail-yank-region).

C-c C-q

Fill each paragraph cited from another message (mail-fill-yanked-message).

When mail sending is invoked from the Rmail mail reader using an Rmail command, C-c C-y can be used inside the mail buffer to insert the text of the message you are replying to. Normally it indents each line of that message three spaces and eliminates most header fields (as specified by the variable mail-yank-ignored-headers). A numeric argument specifies the number of spaces to indent (the variable mail-indentation-spaces specifies the default number). An argument of just C-u says not to indent at all and not to eliminate anything. C-c C-y always uses the current message from the Rmail buffer, so you can insert several old messages by selecting one in Rmail, switching to ‘*mail*’ and yanking it, then switching back to Rmail to select another.

You can specify the text for C-c C-y to insert at the beginning of each line: set mail-yank-prefix to the desired string. (A value of nil means to use indentation; this is the default.) However, C-u C-c C-y never adds anything at the beginning of the inserted lines, regardless of the value of mail-yank-prefix.

To yank just a part of an incoming message, set the region in Rmail to the part you want; then go to the ‘*Mail*’ message and type C-c C-r (mail-yank-region). Each line that is copied is indented or prefixed according to mail-yank-prefix.

After using C-c C-y or C-c C-r, you can type C-c C-q (mail-fill-yanked-message) to fill the paragraphs of the yanked old message or messages. One use of C-c C-q fills all such paragraphs, each one individually. To fill a single paragraph of the quoted message, use M-q. If filling does not automatically handle the type of citation prefix you use, try setting the fill prefix explicitly. See Filling.

You can customize mail citation through the hook mail-citation-hook. For example, you can use the Supercite package, which provides more flexible citation (see Introduction).