Re: RMAIL against Texinfo

[Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@elta.co.il> writes:

>> From: Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de>
>> Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2004 22:51:31 +0100
>> 
>> This will still remove frumple-info and tex-info from the list of
>> addresses.
>
> So you are saying that using \` instead of \< would be better?  (I
> used \< because I thought about addresses like
> <info-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>, with the brackets intact.)

I see.

Now I've looked in rmail-dont-reply-to and I see that I had wildly
guessed at what it might do, but I guessed completely wrong.

Lesson: always look at the source code first.

It seems that rmail-dont-reply-to-names is already anchored to the
beginning of an email address by the existing code?  Or am I
misreading?

>> Also, there is experience with nnmail-fancy-split in Gnus, which
>> automatically surrounds regexes with \\< and \\>.  Users are supposed
>> to say ".*foo.*" if they want to undo the effect of \\<...\\>.  But
>> after some years it turned out that this didn't always work, and now
>> there is additional code in the function supporting nnmail-split-fancy
>> which checks for the regex starting with ".*"...  I forgot what
>> exactly was the problem, though.
>
> Well, do you see any reason that this would be relevant to the case
> in point?  mail-utils.el doesn't surround regular expressions with \<
> and \>, it only does that with usernames, which aren't regexps.

Didn't you suggest to automagically add \\<...\\> to the regexp
constructed from rmail-dont-reply-to-names?  And
rmail-dont-reply-to-names is documented to be a regexp.

>> I'm afraid that with a similar change for rmail-dont-reply-to-names,
>> you might fall into similar traps.
>
> Like what?

After some gmaning, ISTR that there was a problem when the regex
started or ended with a non-word character.  For instance, if you
wanted to exclude the user name foo_, then auto-appending \\> to the
regex would do no good, as "foo_\\>" can never match.

It is, of course unusual for a user name to start or end with a
non-word character.  But in the case of fancy splitting in Gnus,
people would often use regexes like "foo@".

Hm.  I think that there was also a boundary case where not even adding
".*" would work.  I can't give a realistic example, but if the user
name foo_ was naked and the last one, then the string to be matched
against would end like "...foo_".  And the regex "foo_.*\\>" does not
match this string.

That's why fancy splitting in Gnus has code to detect whether the
regex entered by the user starts/ends with .*, and if so, the
corresponding \\</\\> is omitted.

Please take the above with a grain of salt; I'm giving you what I can
remember but I don't remember exactly.  As I said in my previous post,
it would be good to ask the Gnus folks for any gotchas.  (If I knew
all the gotchas already, I didn't have to suggest asking the Gnus
folks...)

>> And it doesn't even cover all cases.
>
> Sure, but it does make the current situation better, doesn't it?

It still means that there is more magic going on, and more magic is
not necessarily good.

Kai