exmh-async (a golden oldie)

I'm having trouble with exmh-async which looks a lot like debian bug 294062.
That bug was closed in 2005, but its submitter seemed to indicate that his
problem had not been solved.  The bug was never reopened, however.

Now I've sent a fair amount of mail since 2005 without incident, but I've
recently had to reinstall my Mandriva 2009.1 system and seeem to have 
resurrected the old bug.

The problem is, of course, that the alternate editor, emacs, does not get 
called, although the message says that it's happening.  When I run it as a 
terminal command, I get the following:

Error in startup script: no application named "emacs"
    while executing
"send $exmh [list Edit_Ident [winfo name .]]"
    (file "/usr/bin/exmh-async" line 17)

Give-away works fine.

I have used exmh versions 2.6.2 and 2.7.2 and tcl/tk 8.6.0.  I don't believe 
that the Emacs version matters, since I get the same error regardless of which 
program is offered to exmh-async.

I'd be grateful for any insight you can provide.

Thanks,

Mike