Re: 2 nits about mailabbrev

[John Owens]

Kevin Rodgers <ihs_4664 <at> yahoo.com> writes: 
> John Owens wrote:

>  > Now, while that looks nice, the . after W is not in fact good syntax,
>  > and to make it compliant (RFC 822), it should really expand to
>  >
>  > To: "George W. Bush" <president <at> whitehouse.gov>
> 
> Yes, but don't those other MUAs that grok .alias also generate a
> non-compliant To: header?  And isn't the solution to that problem to
> explicitly include the necessary quotes:
> 
> alias gwbush "\"George W. Bush\" <president <at> whitehouse.gov>"

The other MUAs probably do it wrong. However, in my informal experiments
with different MUAs some time ago (I think I tried VM, /bin/mail, and
Wanderlust), the most widely supported format among MUAs was 

alias gwbush "George W. Bush <address@hidden>"

Other formats had errors in different MUAs. I do encourage others to
try different MUAs to check. But my conclusion at the time was 
certainly that I should leave my .alias in the format above, since it
was the most widely supported.

The issue at hand, I think, is "what should mailabbrev do?" It seems to
me that no matter what other MUAs might do, mailabbrev should take the
common .alias format as an input and output a RFC-822 compliant string
if it can. I think that's better than the current behavior. 

> Doesn't this code from sendmail-send-it do the right thing?
> (snipped)

It may, although I'm using mailabbrev without sendmail-send-it, so it
doesn't help me. I think putting it in both places would not hurt; some
people use mailabbrev without sendmail-send-it, some people use 
sendmail-send-it without mailabbrev, and they could certainly be
mutually compatible. It would be possible to control mailabbrev's
munging with a variable and set it as nil by default, but since my 
proposed change doesn't hurt anything and only makes it more correct
(I hope), I don't think this is necessary.

JDO