Homepage: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs
Abbrev-expansion of mail aliases
This file ensures that, when the point is in a To:, Cc:, Bcc:, or From:
field, word-abbrevs are defined for each of your mail aliases. These
aliases will be defined from your .mailrc file (or the file specified by
`mail-personal-alias-file') if it exists. Your mail aliases will
expand any time you type a word-delimiter at the end of an abbreviation.
What you see is what you get: if mailabbrev is in use when you type
a name, and the name does not expand, you know it is not an abbreviation.
However, if you yank abbreviations into the headers
in a way that bypasses the check for abbreviations,
they are expanded (but not visibly) when you send the message.
Your mail alias abbrevs will be in effect only when the point is in an
appropriate header field. When in the body of the message, or other
header fields, the mail aliases will not expand. Rather, the normal
mode-specific abbrev table will be used if
defined. So if you use mail-mode specific abbrevs, this code will not
adversely affect you. You can control which header fields the abbrevs
are used in by changing the variable mail-abbrev-mode-regexp.
If auto-fill mode is on, abbrevs will wrap at commas instead of at word
boundaries; also, header continuation-lines will be properly indented.
You can also insert a mail alias with mail-abbrev-insert-alias
(bound to C-c C-a), which prompts you for an alias (with completion)
and inserts its expansion at point.
This file fixes a bug in the old system which prohibited your .mailrc
file from having lines like
alias someone "John Doe "
That is, if you want an address to have embedded spaces, simply surround it
with double-quotes. This is necessary because the format of the .mailrc
file bogusly uses spaces as address delimiters. The following line defines
an alias which expands to three addresses:
alias foobar addr-1 addr-2 "address three "
(This is bogus because mail-delivery programs want commas, not spaces,
but that's what the file format is, so we have to live with it.)
If you like, you can call the function define-mail-abbrev to define your
mail aliases instead of using a .mailrc file. When you call it in this
way, addresses are separated by commas.
CAVEAT: This works on most Sun systems; I have been told that some versions
of /bin/mail do not understand double-quotes in the .mailrc file. So you
should make sure your version does before including verbose addresses like
this. One solution to this, if you are on a system whose /bin/mail doesn't
work that way, (and you still want to be able to /bin/mail to send mail in
addition to Emacs) is to define minimal aliases (without full names) in
your .mailrc file, and use define-mail-abbrev to redefine them when sending
mail from Emacs; this way, mail sent from /bin/mail will work, and mail
sent from Emacs will be pretty.
Aliases in the mailrc file may be nested. If you define aliases like
alias group1 fred ethel
alias group2 larry curly moe
alias everybody group1 group2
Then when you type "everybody" on the To: line, it will be expanded to
fred, ethyl, larry, curly, moe
Aliases may also contain forward references; the alias of "everybody" can
precede the aliases of "group1" and "group2".
This code also understands the "source" .mailrc command, for reading
aliases from some other file as well.
Aliases may contain hyphens, as in "alias foo-bar foo@bar"; word-abbrevs
normally cannot contain hyphens, but this code works around that for the
specific case of mail-alias word-abbrevs.
To read in the contents of another .mailrc-type file from Emacs, use the
command Meta-X merge-mail-abbrevs. The rebuild-mail-abbrevs command is
similar, but will delete existing aliases first.
If you would like your aliases to be expanded when you type M-> or ^N to
move out of the mail-header into the message body (instead of having to
type SPC at the end of the abbrev before moving away) then you can do
(add-hook
'mail-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(define-key mail-mode-map [remap next-line] 'mail-abbrev-next-line)
(define-key mail-mode-map [remap end-of-buffer] 'mail-abbrev-end-of-buffer)))
If you want multiple addresses separated by a string other than ", " then
you can set the variable mail-alias-separator-string to it. This has to
be a comma bracketed by whitespace if you want any kind of reasonable
behavior.
Thanks to Harald Hanche-Olsen, Michael Ernst, David Loeffler, and
Noah Friedman for suggestions and bug reports.
To use this package, do (add-hook 'mail-mode-hook 'mail-abbrevs-setup).