Re: Aliases with mailing lists

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Bob Newell <bobnewell@bobnewell.net> writes:

>>
>> However, when I have a mailing list, and press space to expand
>> the mailing list, a different mechanism, namely abbrevs, is
>> used. So there is no identity selection based on the members
>> of the mailing list.
>>
>> I'm trying to make this work to select identity, and have been
>> trying hacks in mailabbrev.el, where the action seems to take
>> place in mail-abbrev-expand-wrapper. I think I might be able
>> to get it to work, but the real question is, should this be
>> built-in to gnus somehow?
>
> Well ... I did get this to work in an embarrassingly hackish
> manner, which I'm too ashamed to post but will share with
> anyone who has the same obscure issue.
>
> In any case hacking mailabbrev.el, which is not part of Gnus,
> might be out of scope for this mailing list. Certainly,
> putting Gnus specific code into mailabbrev.el, which is what I
> did, is unacceptable for general use.
>
> I'm still seeking a way to do this within Gnus, where it
> belongs, but it looks to be non-trivial for someone at my
> admittedly non-stellar skill level.

Completion in message-mode has always been weird, and it's gotten
temporarily weirder as someone (I assume Stefan) has started nudging it
over to use Emacs' standard completion mechanisms.

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

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.