Re: Aliases with mailing lists

[Bob Newell <bobnewell@bobnewell.net>]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

> I'm also a little unclear of what situation you're seeing exactly: do
> you mean that expanding names in the "To/From/Cc" headers triggers an
> alias switch, but expanding group names in the "Newsgroups" header
> doesn't? But the only place `expand-abbrev' is used in header completion
> is in the "To/From/Cc" header, so I don't really understand how the two
> situations differ.

I think I inadvertently left out an important piece of
information. BBDB is in use here. I create my own mailing
lists using the 'mail-alias' BBDB field.

The problem comes up when I enter a BBDB defined mail-alias in
the To: field and press the spacebar to expand that into the
full list of BBDB addresses that have the mail-alias in
question. The list appears, of course, but
gnu-alias-determine-identity doesn't run, and so my From:
address (etc.) isn't altered, when in fact based on one or more of
the mail-alias entries, I may want it changed in accord with
my gnus alias rules.

The BBDB mail-alias expansion takes place in
mail-abbrev-expand-wrapper in mailabbrevs.el which is not part
of Gnus. That's where I did some horribly shameful hacking.

Everything is fine with simple tab completion of a
(non-mail-alias) regular email address in the To: field.

> I also don't know what hook gnus-alias uses to do its alias switching;
> if we knew that then this would be easier.

This happens with tab completion with the following line of code:

(add-hook 'bbdb-complete-mail-hook 'gnus-alias-determine-identity)

However this mechanism isn't used with mail-alias expansion.

> If your Emacs is recent and you have the option
> `message-expand-name-standard-ui', try setting it to t and see what that
> does.

I'll look into it. Thank you for your reply.

-- 
Bob Newell
Honolulu, Hawai`i

- Via GNU/Linux/Emacs/Gnus/BBDB