MAILRC environment variable

MAILRC environment variable

[Stephen Eglen]

Hello,

I just decided to move my .mailrc from my home directory, and went
looking for how to inform Emacs of where my mailrc file now lives.
The doc string for mail-aliases tells me:

  Alist of mail address aliases,
  or t meaning should be initialized from your mail aliases file.
  (The file's name is normally `~/.mailrc', but your MAILRC environment
  variable can override that name.)

[By the way, should this doc string mention `mail-personal-alias-file'?
Perhaps something like:

  The file's name is normally `~/.mailrc', but your MAILRC environment
  variable or the lisp variable `mail-personal-alias-file' can override
  that name.

Which would take preference if both are set?  Or would both be read?]

I'm a bit bemused as to how $MAILRC is checked.  If I do a recursive
grep through the CVS tree, I don't see references of the form (getenv
"MAILRC").  Am I missing something?

I'd prefer to set $MAILRC since mail-personal-alias-file is not yet
recognised in XEmacs.  (Instead, it has mail-abbrev-mailrc-file.)

Thanks, Stephen

Re: MAILRC environment variable

[Richard Stallman]

It appears that `mail-personal-alias-file' is used, and the MAILRC
envvar is not.  So I will update the doc string of `mail-aliases'.