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You can compose the message by simply typing the contents of it, line
by line. But usually this is not enough, you would need to edit
your text, to quote some messages, etc. Mail provides these
capabilities through compose escapes. The compose escapes
are single-character commands, preceded by special escape character,
which defaults to ‘~’. The combination escape character + command
is recognized as a compose escape only if it occurs at the beginning of
a line. If the escape character must appear at the beginning of a
line, enter it twice.
The actual escape character may be changed by setting the value of
escape mail variable (see Mail Variables).