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mh-e: Getting Started

 
 2 Getting Started
 *****************
 
 Because there are many old versions of MH-E out there, it is important
 to know which version you have.  I’ll be talking about Version 8 which
 is pretty close to Version 6 and Version 7.  It differs from Version 4
 and Version 5 and is vastly different from Version 3.  History.
 
    To determine which version of MH-E that you have, enter ‘M-x
 mh-version <RET>’.  Hopefully it says that you’re running Version 8.6
 which is the latest version as of this printing.
 
    If your version is much older than this, please consider upgrading.
 You can have your system administrator upgrade the system-wide version,
 or you can install your own personal version.  It’s really quite easy.
 Getting MH-E, for instructions for getting and installing MH-E.
 
    If the ‘mh-version’ command displays ‘No MH variant detected’(1),
 then you need to install MH or tell MH-E where to find MH.
 
    If you don’t have MH on your system already, you must install a
 variant of MH.  The Debian mh-e package does this for you automatically
 (Getting MH-E).  Most people use nmh
 (http://www.nongnu.org/nmh/), but you may be interested in trying out
 GNU mailutils MH (http://mailutils.org/), which supports IMAP.  Your
 GNU/Linux distribution probably has packages for both of these.
 
    If you’ve never run MH before, you need to run ‘install-mh’ from the
 shell before you continue.  This sets up your personal MH
 environment(2).  If you don’t, you’ll be greeted with the error message:
 ‘Install MH and run install-mh before running MH-E’.  This is all you
 need to know about MH to use MH-E, but the more you know about MH, the
 more you can leverage its power.  See the MH book
 (http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/mh/../) to learn more about MH.
 
    Your MH environment includes your “MH profile” which is found in the
 file ‘~/.mh_profile’, or the file named in the environment variable
 ‘$MH’.  This file contains a number of “MH profile components”.  For
 example, the ‘Path:’ MH profile component contains the path to your mail
 directory, which is ‘~/Mail’ by default.
 
    There are several options MH-E uses to interact with your MH
 installation.  The option ‘mh-variant’ specifies the variant used by
 MH-E (Options).  The default setting of this option is
 ‘Auto-detect’ which means that MH-E will automatically choose the first
 of nmh, MH, or GNU mailutils MH that it finds in the directories listed
 in ‘mh-path’ (which you can customize), ‘mh-sys-path’, and ‘exec-path’.
 If MH-E can’t find MH at all, you may have to customize ‘mh-path’ and
 add the directory in which the command ‘mhparam’ is located.  If, on the
 other hand, you have both nmh and GNU mailutils MH installed (for
 example) and ‘mh-variant-in-use’ was initialized to nmh but you want to
 use GNU mailutils MH, then you can set ‘mh-variant’ to ‘gnu-mh’.
 
    When ‘mh-variant’ is changed, MH-E resets ‘mh-progs’, ‘mh-lib’,
 ‘mh-lib-progs’, ‘mh-flists-present-flag’, and ‘mh-variant-in-use’
 accordingly.
 
 
 
      Prior to version 8, it was often necessary to set some of these
      variables in ‘~/.emacs’; now it is no longer necessary and can
      actually cause problems.
 
    In addition to setting variables that point to MH itself, MH-E also
 sets a handful of variables that point to where you keep your mail.
 During initialization, the function ‘mh-find-path’ sets ‘mh-user-path’
 from your ‘Path:’ MH profile component (but defaults to ‘Mail’ if one
 isn’t present), ‘mh-draft-folder’ from ‘Draft-Folder:’, ‘mh-unseen-seq’
 from ‘Unseen-Sequence:’, ‘mh-previous-seq’ from ‘Previous-Sequence:’,
 and ‘mh-inbox’ from ‘Inbox:’ (defaults to ‘+inbox’).  The hook
 ‘mh-find-path-hook’ is run after these variables have been set.  This
 hook can be used the change the value of these variables if you need to
 run with different values between MH and MH-E.
 
    ---------- Footnotes ----------
 
    (1) In very old versions of MH-E, you may get the error message,
 ‘Cannot find the commands `inc' and `mhl' and the file `components'’ if
 MH-E can’t find MH.  In this case, you need to update MH-E, and you may
 need to install MH too.  However, newer versions of MH-E are better at
 finding MH if it is on your system.
 
    (2) See the section Setting Up MH
 (http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/mh/../overall/setup.html) in the MH
 book.
 

Info Catalog mh-e: Conventions mh-e: Top mh-e: Tour Through MH-E