Re: message-alternative-emails

[Yuri D'Elia]

On Sun, 02 Jan 2011 08:37:17 +0100, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen wrote:
>> In my .gnus file I have the following:
>>
>> (setq message-alternative-emails
>>   (concat
>>     "\\(email\\)\\|" ...
>>     "\\(email\\)\\|" ... ))
>>
>> (setq message-dont-reply-to-names
>>   (concat
>>     "\\(" (regexp-quote user-mail-address) "\\)\\|"
>>     message-alternative-emails))
>>
>> (setq gnus-ignored-from-addresses message-dont-reply-to-names)
>>
>> It sounds like there should be a way to avoid all that repetition. Why
>> aren't these variables derived from each-other automatically by default?
>
> The last variable is derived from `user-mail-address'.  The first second
> wouldn't make sense to derive from the first, I think.

Except that user-mail-address can only accept a single address.

Currently:

  message-alternative-emails: defaults to nil
  message-dont-reply-to-names: defaults to nil (which means to strip
    user-mail-address)
  gnus-ignored-from-addresses defaults to user-mail-address

Wouldn't it make more sense to derive message-dont-reply-to-names and
gnus-ignored-from-addresses from a combination of user-mail-address and
message-alternative-emails?

It seems to me that the purpose of such variables is to easily recognize
yourself from your different email aliases (except maybe from
message-dont-reply-to-names which may be a superset), and such the
defaults are a bit unsatisfactory.

To be more precise:

message-dont-reply-to-names defaulting to:

(when message-alternative-emails
  (concat "\\(" (regexp-quote user-mail-address) "\\)\\|\\("
    message-alternative-emails "\\)"))

it makes more sense to avoid replying to one of your many identities.

then default gnus-ignored-from-addresses from
message-dont-reply-to-names? If message-dont-reply-to-names is really
supposed to be a superset, then I would prefer
gnus-ignored-from-addresses to default of the combination of
user-mail-address and message-alternative-emails as above.

I still do believe that message-dont-reply-to-names is mostly used as a
way to filter out yourself though, and using it as a default for
gnus-ignored-from-addresses should be fine.

The opposite should be always true however: message-dont-reply-to-names
is probably always a subset of gnus-ignored-from-addresses, though it's
probably defined too late to be used as a default.

Any comment?

I could supply a patch for this.