Multiple Mailings

[Bob Newell <bobnewell@bobnewell.net>]

Aloha everyone,

As many people do, I use the 'alias' feature of BBDB to set up mailing
lists. I typically expand the list into a BCC: field in my message, and
put in a generic address as the To: element. This works fine, as
expected, except that some spam filters don't like mail coming to a
generic address instead of the recipient's real address.

Well, in Gnus all is possible. So I found some code on the web and
modified it, so that an expanded mailing list is parsed and individual
mails get sent to the real address of each recipient. So, say 18 on the
list, 18 separate email transactions.

Very fine, except Gnus insists on prompting me for Each And Every Copy,
and that gets very tiresome. I think there could be a change
made. Looking in message.el, about line 4120 in my version, we have
this code fragment:

	(when (and (or (not (memq (car elem)
				  message-sent-message-via))
		       (message-fetch-field "supersedes")
		       (if (or (message-gnksa-enable-p 'multiple-copies)
			       (not (eq (car elem) 'news)))
			   (y-or-n-p
			    (format
			     "Already sent message via %s; resend? "
			     (car elem)))
			 (error "Denied posting -- multiple copies")))
		   (setq success (funcall (caddr elem) arg)))
	  (setq sent t))))

I thought that by enabling 'multiple-copies in the
'message-gnksa-shoot-feet variable, I would avoid prompting. But as the
code above shows (once I figured out the nestings!) that isn't the
case. 'multiple-copies only comes into play under certain circumstances,
and will never prevent prompting.

But shouldn't it? Is there really a reason to force prompting all the
time? Is that perhaps my use case--- automated single mailings to
multiple users--- is out of scope? (Or potentially very spammy, but I
should take responsibility for that.)

My workaround was to do temporary :around advice on y-or-n-p forcing 't'
but that's hackish to say the least.

Comments welcome. I could propose a patch but the logic is a little
complex and I would likely miss a paren somewhere.

-- 
Bob Newell
Honolulu, Hawai`i
* Via Gnus/BBDB/Org/Emacs/Linux *