Re: address@hidden: in ~/.mh_profile side effect -- "from:" aliases no longer expanded by send

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Mon, 15 Mar 2021 08:03:26 -0500
    From:        Tom R <nmh@trodman.com>
    Message-ID:  <202103151303.12FD3Qo03115980@epjdn.zq3q.org>

Temporarily ignoring whatever issues nmh may have
in this area ...

  | I have several cron jobs that depend on send
  | expanding from aliases,

I think that is a poor idea.  I see aliases
(whether nmh e-mail address aliases, shell
command aliases, even DNS CNAME record aliases)
as a human factors enhancement ... it is easier
to remember and to type a short nickname than
the full thing.   But that does not apply to
anything put in any file ... that you do once
and it just remains there.   If needed, because
it needs to be lots of places (not applicable
here really) and it changes moderateky frequently,
then a layer of indirection can always be added
which extracts the name to use from a common
file and then uses that.

For nmh type uses, I have never even considered
using an al8as for the From field, I just use
different components files (which, if it helps,
can be given names which incorporate what you
might consider the alias name).

If the script is to  generate the entire message
itself (not use a components file) then instead
of

        echo From: $alias

you could use

        grep ^From: /..../components.$alias

where the pathname part might be

        ${HOME}/$(mhparam Path)

or similar.

My point is that there is almost certainly
a way to achieve what you need without waiting
on possibly never appearing nmh changes, but
that you might need to revisit some assumptions
that have previously been made about the way
that things should work.

kre