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From: George Kadianakis <desnacked@riseup.net>
To: notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: emacs: How to tab-complete destination email addresses?
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2020 19:00:37 +0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87h7roa3fe.fsf@riseup.net> (raw)

Hello list,

when I write an email with notmuch on emacs, I use tab-completion to
auto-complete email addresses. It's just impossible to remember all the
email addresses.

The problem is that, while doing that and over the past few months, I've
sent many emails to obsolete email addresses that people have stopped
using for like 8 years now, just because that email address was in my
inbox somewhere. This is bad because people never receive those emails.

It seems to me that the ab-completion logic of emacs-notmuch is naive
and does no effort to actually find a useful email address for the
person in question.

How are you all handling this problem?

It seems like the interesting function here is
`notmuch-address-expand-name`, which calls notmuch-address(1). So far so
good.

However notmuch-address seems to be simple and Unixy enough that we
can't expect it to do fun heuristics like choosing the best email
address that should be used in each occasion. Furthermore, I can't tell
notmuch-address which addresses it uses wrong and teach it to use the
right ones.

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).

But I think the right way would be to somehow introduce a bunch of
heuristics in notmuch/emacs so that the right email address is chosen
for each person. For example, if I tab-complete "Alice", I would like
notmuch to give me the email address that Alice has used herself most
frequently the past few times she contacted me.

Perhaps there is something that does what I want already?
If that's the case, I'd love to be pointed to a good solution!

Thanks for all your work on notmuch!:)

             reply	other threads:[~2020-09-23 16:00 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2020-09-23 16:00 George Kadianakis [this message]
2020-09-23 16:20 ` emacs: How to tab-complete destination email addresses? Jameson Graef Rollins
2020-09-24 17:03   ` George Kadianakis
2020-09-24 17:47     ` David Bremner
2020-09-24 20:09       ` Jameson Graef Rollins
2020-09-29 19:46 ` Alexander Adolf

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