Re: emacs: How to tab-complete destination email addresses?

[Alexander Adolf <alexander.adolf@condition-alpha.com>]

Hello George,

George Kadianakis <desnacked@riseup.net> writes:

> [...]
> So what to do?
>
> One way forward is to switch from using notmuch-address to using
> something like bbdb and manually curate my database (since bbdb offers
> this capability).
> [...]

Another option is to use company [1], or any other completion framework
that also offers aggregation of completion candidates from several
sources. In the default configuration, company uses notmuch-address as
one of its message mode back-ends. You can add other sources (e.g. bbdb)
easily, if they're not included in the default config already. LDAP can
also be added via EUDC [2].

[1] http://company-mode.github.io
[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eudc.html

On a loosely related note: picking the "most relevant", or "best" match
when there's more than one candidate address, is non-trivial. "Least
recently used" is one possible heuristic, but which - when used in
isolation - will likely produce misleading results. If you send a couple
of messages to old addresses, as you described happened to you, that
would push those old addresses up in the ranking. So I guess one would
minimally also need to consider whether those addresses were sent to, or
received from. But then, if someone changes their email address, any
recommendation system would keep suggesting the old address for a
while. Hence, the only solution that works somewhat reliably, to my
experience is linking the lookup with an address book of sorts. When I
update the address book with a new address, I will be presented the new
address at the top of the candidate list.


In short terms, my suggestion is to consider using company, and link it
up with you address book application.


Cheers,

  --alex