ZMAIL Move question.

[Barry Margolin <barmar@THINK.COM>]

    Date: Tue, 15 Aug 89 15:41 PDT
    From: snicoud@atc.boeing.com (Stephen Nicoud)

	Date: Tue, 15 Aug 89 18:23 EDT
	From: Barry Margolin <barmar@Think.COM.ARPANET>

	    Date: Tue, 15 Aug 89 14:17 PDT
	    From: snicoud@atc.boeing.com (Stephen Nicoud)

	    I'd like ZMAIL to merely append or
	    prepend the message to the selected file.

	You can't do that with Zmail.  Zmail is patterned after Zmacs:  files
	are read into buffers, manipulated, and then written back to files.

							barmar

    Hmmm.  Too bad. 8^(

    How difficult would it be to add a mail command to do this?  We don't
    have mailer sources, so I can't judge this myself.  It would be
    extremely useful, though.  Especially if it were one of the mouseable
    command options and one of the Map Over options in addition to an
    extended command.

    Steve

I don't think it would be too easy.  Zmail's primitives for dealing with
mail files are all accessed through buffer flavors (there's a different
buffer flavor for each format of mail file).

If you're not concerned with maintaining mail file format, you can use
c-R to edit the message and then "m-X Append To File" or "m-X Prepend To
File".  This appends or prepends the region to a specified text file
(prepending will be slow for a large file, because there's no way to
prepend in place, so it has to copy the file's contents).

                                                barmar