emacs arcania: rewrapping lines in mail

[Jeff Abrahamson <jeff@purple.com>]

A bit of arcania for emacs:

I read mail with mutt and edit with emacsclient (so emacs).

Suppose a paragraph is quoted but doesn't have (correct) linefeeds. So
I want to re-wrap it. Basically, I want to use fill-region or
fill-paragraph (depending on whether it's a paragraph or not).

Fill will insert or move the quote string ("> ") as needed sometimes
but not other times. This is related to the value of
adaptive-fill-first-line-regex and where point and mark are.

The trick is, I haven't quite figured out when it's going to do it
right and when it isn't.

I know I could change the value of adaptive-fill-first-line-regex and
adaptive-fill-func, but wrapping commented text in mail is so common,
it must be easy if only one knows the secret.

Does anyone completely understand this and able to say something
cogent and useful?

-- 
 Jeff

 Jeff Abrahamson  <http://www.purple.com/jeff/>