1. A mail user agent for Emacs VM (View Mail) is an Emacs subsystem that allows UNIX mail to be read and disposed of within Emacs. Commands exist to do the normal things expected of a mail user agent, such as generating replies, saving messages to folders, deleting messages and so on. There are other more advanced commands that do tasks like bursting and creating digests, message forwarding, and organizing message presentation according to various criteria. With smtpmail in modern emacsen, you do not need a MTA locally in order to use VM. VM 6.x versions have problems with the library tm-vm from the Tiny Mime (TM) package, since that version was written for VM 5.X. Indeed, the problems seems to exist with semi as well. This package comes (by default) bundled in with XEmacs. From Debian 3.0r0 APT