Thank you for your help and comments. Just to recap (as this thread
has got quite long) i had wanted to use a text editor to speed up
answering emails and considered Mutt and Emacs. I had used Thunderbird
for sometime and liked the app. A text email client seemed the answer
but i wasn't that impressed by Mutt.

However, i'm not as knowledgeable as some and setting up Mutt was ok
but still involved quite a bit of work. I got it all working and did
appreciate your help.

Yesterday i came across a Thunderbird addon Muttador (still beta stage
- vi editor) and today came across a non-mozilla TB addon called
Exteditor...
http://globs.org/articles.php?lng=en&pg=2
some v.clever person has developed an external editor addon instead of
the TB editor. It allows emacs, vi, joe, gedit or whatever to compose
emails. Should be of interest to anyone who wants to say goodbye to
the mouse while editing emails.

Just in case someone was interested.