Re: Generating Mail-Followup-To: headers

[Josh Huber <huber@alum.wpi.edu>]

prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc) writes:

> That will use the symbol 'Mail-Followup-To, not its variable value.
> We want this:
>       (message-generate-headers `((optional . ,Mail-Followup-To)))))
> Or this:
>       (message-generate-headers (list (cons 'optional Mail-Followup-To)))))

Okay, my cluelessness about macros, etc is showing.

Notice my hack above:

(let ((Mail-Followup-To (message-make-mft)))
     (message-generate-headers '(optional . Mail-Followup-To))))

This works, but I think because message-generate-headers uses the
symbol name for the header name, and the variable value for the value
of the header.

if I did `((optional . ,Mail-Followup-To)), what would it use for the
header name?  Wouldn't the value be spliced in, so how would it know
what to use?

hmm... that function is confusing anyway.  what I really want to do is
pass in the equivilant of this information:

1. the header is optional (this way it won't ask the user for it if it's
   empty)
2. the header name is "Mail-Followup-To"
3. the header value is "..."

Can someone enlighten me as to how this is supposed to be done?  Am I
supposed to set the symbol Mail-Followup-To to the contents of the
header?  Is there another way?

> We should also check that this is a mail message, not news.

I'm confused.  At the top, inside the first let there is a
(message-this-is-mail t), but below there are checks to see if this is
news...for example:

... (if news nil message-deletable-headers) ...

so...what is this?  message-send-mail, but sometimes it's used for
news?

> I'd use equal, not string=, or else restructure the logic so that
> when we reach this point, we already know that there is an MFT
> field.  It happens that string= will interpret the value nil as the
> string "nil", and so this will still work as-is, but relying on that
> just scares me.

Okay, I changed it around and use equal instead.

> Rather than match all regexps against the recipients, and then look
> for a non-nil result, we could iterate through the regexp list and
> stop as soon as we find a match.  It'd also be better to match each
> regexp against each recipient address individually, using only the
> address itself and not the name part, instead of against the whole
> recipient string.

Yeah, that would be better, but extracting the address part might be
hard. (have you seen the regexp in the Mastering Regular Expressions
book for matching an email address?)

I can see splitting the string up by ',' and interatively checking
each one of those with each of the regular expressions.

Of course, if your regex's are exact enough, then it should work :P

(btw, this setup seems to work for me with the utility function I
posted for reading all the to-address/list values from group
parameters)

ttyl,

-- 
Josh Huber