Re: Generating Mail-Followup-To: headers

[Matt Armstrong <matt@lickey.com>]

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

> Matt Armstrong <matt@lickey.com> wrote:
>> I forget the status of Gnus support for generating Mail-Followup-To:
>> headers.  Is somebody planning to implement this?
> 
> I am.  I wasn't planning to do it as a plain hook function because I
> figured it should be on by default, but I have the impression hook
> variables ought to be nil by default.  That will make it a bit
> hairier, but still doable.
> 
> I'm thinking something in gnus-msg.el, during initialization of a
> new message buffer, can detect when there is a to-list or to-address
> parameter for the current group; if so, it'll add a header field
> like "X-Gnus-Generate-MFT: yes" (by default; it could be disabled by
> setting some variable).  Then when we send the message, if that
> field is present, we remove it, and if there is also no existing
> MFT, then we add one based on To+Cc.
> 
> If you want to have a go at it, feel free.  I'm not sure when I'd
> get around to it.

I think the hardest part is determining which lists the user is
subscribed to.  I don't think to-address is sufficient.

I have several groups into which multiple mailing lists get dumped.
For example, all my work e-mail gets dumped into a single group, but
there are 10-20 frequently used work mailing lists.  And very low
volume lists just end up in my main inbox group.  So the to-address
parameter is not sufficient to express all the lists I'm on.

And if we're not relying directly on to-address, I think this can be
put into the 'message' package.

I was thinking of a global variable holding all subscribed lists --
just a list of addresses:

     (setq message-subscribed-addresses '("ding" "postfix-users"))

There could even be utility functions that read ~/.lists (for Qmail
users) and that goes through all the Gnus group parameters looking for
to-address parameters, as well as extracting stuff from
gnus-parameter-to-address-alist.  This could be controlled by a list
of functions that produce additional addresses:

    (setq message-subscribed-addresses-functions
          '(message-subscribed-addresses-qmail
            gnus-get-subscribed-addresses))

With this list available, all Mail-Followup-To: generation can be done
right before the message is sent.

-- 
matt