Re: September Gnus 0.60 is released

[Hallvard B Furuseth <h.b.furuseth@usit.uio.no>]

> Hallvard B Furuseth <h.b.furuseth@usit.uio.no> writes:
> 
>> I'd like a user-mail-address-hook which programs (optionally) should run
>> before they use user-mail-address.  This is because the "official" mail
>> address (as opposed to some "working" mail address) can be expensive to
>> compute, so it should only be computed when it's needed, not in
>> default.el.  
> 
> I thought most sites just did something like:
> 
> (setq user-mail-address (concat (user-login-name) "@our.nice.site"))

That doesn't work here at UiO outside ifi.uio.
Well, this does work:
	(concat (user-login-name) "@any.ugly.uio-machine.name")
but it does not yield the user's official address.

The reason is that all of UiO (except ifi.uio) has a common user
database, but UiO has several sub-domains (for the various departments).
The *only* way to learn which sub-domain a user belongs to, is to ask
the mail system.

Example:

my-user@my-host-name:	         hbf@durin.uio.no
my-email-address:	h.b.furuseth@usit.uio.no

In outgoing mail, user@machine addresses are converted to the user's
official address, so that recipients will never see anything else than
the official address --- except in news messages.  Ouch.

> What did you have in mind that a typical `user-mail-address-hook'
> would do?

The one at UiO would set user-mail-address to the output of the shell
command

	`pk address <<user-login-name>>`


Regards,

Hallvard