Forcing mail to use emacs

[Patrick Goebel]

When you launch mail from the shell prompt and get past the subject
line, or when you reply to an incoming message, you end up in the
ex mail editor.  Usually the first thing I do is type ~e which
brings up emacs (since my EDITOR valriable is set to emacs in my
.mailrc file).

Now here's the million dollar question: Is there any way to have mail
default to emacs WITHOUT having to type ~e?  As a (green) system
administrator, such a setting would be invaluable to the more naive
users.

Cheers!
--patrick goebel
  patrick at casbs.Stanford.EDU