Re: starting an external command from emacs

[Dan Espen <daneNO@MORE.mk.SPAMtelcordia.com>]

Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca> writes:

> hi,
>
> i'm a not-especially-technical person who uses emacs as a
> straightforward text editor; in fact i'm experimenting with living
> inside emacs most of the time on my main laptop, largely to eliminate
> distractions while i'm writing.  however, some significant fraction of
> the stuff i write is intended to be emailed away.  I'd like to do two
> things:
>
> (1) write a function that takes the contents of the current buffer and
> inserts it into a message; 
> (2) use an external script to query an already-existing contacts
> database (for me it's evolution or gmail), and pass that address on to
> the to-header of the resultant message.
>
> (2) seemed difficult to me.  so what i'm trying right now is to write a
> function that invokes mutt with an address string, then, within mutt,
> use emacsclient as my editor, post-mode as my mode, and insert the text
> into the message body.  This is what i have so far:

Have you looked at VM, MH-E, rmail, GNUS?
(Existing Emacs mail interfaces.)