Re: RMAIL against Texinfo

[Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de>]

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

> That seems like a simple bug to me: the intent was to remove the
> "info-*" mailing lists, which are essentially read-only (you are sent
> information, but are not supposed to reply), so the regexp should
> have been anchored at the beginning of a word, like this:
>
>     "\\<info-\\|\\<eliz@elta\\.co\\.il\\>\\|\\<eliz\\>"
>
> (I think my username and email addresses should get the same anchors,
> to avoid filtering out someone whose username happens to be "noteliz",
> for example.)

This will still remove frumple-info and tex-info from the list of
addresses.

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.

I'm afraid that with a similar change for rmail-dont-reply-to-names,
you might fall into similar traps.  And it doesn't even cover all
cases.

A "real" solution might have to parse email addresses such that the
rules can be formulated in an unambiguous way.

Maybe it's useful to also talk with the Gnus folks, since the same
problem happens there (though in a different context).

Kai

PS: nnmail-fancy-split allows you to express which incoming emails
    should go into which group (or mail file, or folder, or ... well,
    I hope you understand what I mean).  So it does something very
    different, but it also matches regexes against email addresses.