Re: Reusing descriptive sender name when replying

[David Bremner <david@tethera.net>]

inasprecali <inasprecali@disroot.org> writes:

> Hello, I have a question which is specifically about the Emacs
> frontend, but which could be about notmuch in general.  For your
> information, I’m using notmuch 0.31.4 and GNU Emacs 27.1.
>
> When pressing "r" to reply to a message, invoking the function
> "notmuch-show-reply-sender", the "From:" address used in the reply
> is automatically deduced from the message I’m currently replying
> to (looking at the code, it looks like it uses the
> notmuch-reply(1) command).  While the address itself is correct,
> the "real", descriptive name (the one used before the actual mail
> address in angled brackets, apologies if this is not the right
> terminology) seems to be always taken from the user.name setting
> in the .notmuch-config file, if any.  If it is not set, a
> descriptive name is not used at all and the address alone is used.

I think the two options supported out of the box are setting user.name
and setting notmuch-identities in emacs. The latter should let you
choose via completing-read at composition time. Otherwise there are more
complex options available via addons like gnus-alias [1] or
message-templ [2].

> My question is: is it possible to automatically reuse the same
> "descriptive" name in the From: header?  I’d like the following to
> be automatically generated just by looking at the original message
> to be replied to, using the same examples as before.  The To:
> header already reuses the same name, as expected.
>
> From: Bar <bar@bar.org>
> To: Foo <foo@foo.org>

I'm curious about your use case. Do you have a large number of values of
"Foo", conveniently provided by the senders of your messages?

At the moment I'm feeling a bit negative about putting more tweaks into
notmuch-reply; it seems like everybody wants something different but
small, and those kind of customizations are better done in the emacs
layer. OTOH I've changed my mind before about this kind of thing.

[1] https://github.com/hexmode/gnus-alias
[2] https://git.tethera.net/message-templ.git/\r