There are two related bugs, one is that in this version of emacs, I cannot complete any mail nic name with an _ in it and when I took out the _ I got the following back trace. Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument syntax-table-p nil) set-syntax-table(nil) mail-abbrev-complete-alias() call-interactively(mail-abbrev-complete-alias) Oort Gnus v0.05 GNU Emacs 21.2.50.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit) of 2002-03-31 on ccs.covici.com 200 ccs.covici.com InterNetNews server INN 2.3.3 (20010809 prerelease) ready