starting an external command from emacs

[Matt Price]

hi,

i'm a not-especially-technical person who uses emacs as a
straightforward text editor; in fact i'm experimenting with living
inside emacs most of the time on my main laptop, largely to eliminate
distractions while i'm writing.  however, some significant fraction of
the stuff i write is intended to be emailed away.  I'd like to do two
things:

(1) write a function that takes the contents of the current buffer and
inserts it into a message; 
(2) use an external script to query an already-existing contacts
database (for me it's evolution or gmail), and pass that address on to
the to-header of the resultant message.

(2) seemed difficult to me.  so what i'm trying right now is to write a
function that invokes mutt with an address string, then, within mutt,
use emacsclient as my editor, post-mode as my mode, and insert the text
into the message body.  This is what i have so far:

(defun start-mutt-with-this-buffer-contents (address)
        (mark-whole-buffer)
        (kill-ring-save) ;; ok this needs a beginning and end but i don't know 
how to do that
        (interactive "M") ;; i think that's right
        (set-buffer (apply 'make-term "Mutt" "mutt" nil (list address))) 
        (switch-to-buffer "*Mutt*")
;; need some kind of "wait for mutt to start composing" thing here
        (post-goto-body)
        (yank)
)


the problem with this right now is that the (yank) occurs too early, and
the yanked text appears in the *Mutt* window, instead of the *Composing*
window where i want it to appear.  is there a way to tell emacs to wait
on mutt till the interactive command is finished, then switch tothe
composing buffer and paste the text in there?  or failing that -- how
might i query an external database from within emacs?  if i could do
that, then i guess i could use one of the many already-existing emacs
mail modes to actually send the message, and provide it with the the
query result as a to-address.  i have, for instance, a couple of python
scripts that return a sequence of lines, one email address per line --
these are designed for use with mutt -- i guess one could put them into
some kind of minibuffer that would then feed the appropriate choice back
to an emacs function.  i just don't know how to do that kind of stuff
myself.  

Thanks in advance for your help!!

matt



-- 
Matt Price
matt.price@utoronto.ca