You may want to stop while writing a message, and continue work on it later. MM provides a way for you to save an outgoing message in a file and to recover it later.
The commands save-draft and restore-draft store an outgoing message in a file and recover it from the file, respectively. At the S> prompt, type save-draft and the filename you want to use. You can then abort sending with the quit command. At any later point, type restore-draft and the filename at the MM> prompt. You will be left at a S> prompt, from which you might use the display command to see what the message looks like, and then other commands to work further on the message text or headers.
MM>send To: fb2 cc: mm33, hk12 Subject: Meeting on Sept 21 Message (End with CTRL/D or ESC Use CTRL/B to insert a file, CTRL/E to enter editor, CTRL/F to run text through a filter, CTRL/K to redisplay message, CTRL/L to clear screen and redisplay, CTRL/N to abort, CTRL/P to run a program and insert output.): Let's meet on Sept 21 at 2:00 to go over [escape] S>save-draft meetingmail S>quit MM>bye $
MM>restore-draft meetingmail S>d From: Joseph Brennan <jb51@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> To: fb2 Cc: mm33, hk12 Subject: Meeting on Sep 17 Let's meet on Sept 21 at 2:00 to go over S>edit
The restore-draft command does not erase the file meetingmail. You need to remove the file using the UNIX shell command rm (remove). In the following example, the shell command is given from an MM prompt by preceding it with an exclamation point.
MM>!rm meetingmail MM>
While save-draft and restore-draft allow you to deliberately interrupt sending, sometimes you may interrupt by accident, usually by typing quit at the S> prompt instead of sending the message. MM actually keeps an outgoing message available until you send it, or start to prepare another outgoing message, or kill MM.
You can sometimes (not always) recover from accidental interrupts with the continue command.
S>q MM>continue S>
Because of the limitations, you should not rely on continue as a regular method to recover an outgoing message. Use save-draft and restore-draft if you want to interrupt on purpose.
There is no way to continue an outgoing message that has been mailed.
If you are writing a message with Emacs, you can save the message text to a file by using the Emacs command control-x control-w, which asks for a filename. Unlike save-draft, it saves only the text and not the headers.
You can read the text you saved back into MM when you are sending a message, by using control-b at MM's Message prompt, or by starting Emacs in MM and then using the Emacs command meta-x insert-file. Any file can be read into a message the same way.