The Draft Folder

The comp, dist, forw, and repl commands allow you to manipulate various draft messages simultanely

Draft messages are created in the draft folder. (The `Draft-Folder' profile entry may be used to change the default draft folder.

New drafts are created unless the user invokes comp with -use, in which case the current draft is used.

The last draft message the user was composing is the current message in the draft folder.

The user can send off whatever drafts desired from the shell using the standard mmh `msgs' convention to the send command:

send f

If no `msgs' are given, the current message is used.

To make all this a bit more clear, here are some examples:

Any of the commands

comp
dist
forw
repl

constructs the message draft in the draft folder using the `b' message number. Furthermore, they each define `c' in this folder to be that message draft. If the user were to use the quit option at `What now?' level, then later on, if no other draft composition was done, the draft could be sent with simply

send

Or, if more editing was required, the draft could be edited with

comp -use

Instead, if other drafts had been composed in the meantime, so that this message draft was no longer known as `c' in the `draft' folder, then the user could scan the folder to see which message draft in the folder should be used for editing or sending. Clever users could even employ a back-quoted pick to do the work:

comp -use `pick +drafts -to nmh-workers`

or

send `pick +drafts -to nmh-workers`

Note that in the comp example, the output from pick must resolve to a single message draft (it makes no sense to talk about composing two or more drafts with one invocation of comp). In contrast, in the send example, as many message drafts as desired can appear, since send doesn't mind sending more than one draft at a time.

It is important to realize that mmh treats the draft folder like a standard MH folder.