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

[George Kadianakis <desnacked@riseup.net>]

Jameson Graef Rollins <jrollins@finestructure.net> writes:

> On Wed, Sep 23 2020, George Kadianakis <desnacked@riseup.net> wrote:
>> 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 the response Jameson!

> I find the convenience of not having to maintain an address book to be a
> huge win with the use of notmuch-address, so I'm generally fine to
> filter through the offered addresses to find the one that I generally
> recognize to be the most viable.  That said, an obvious improvement (as
> you suggest) would be to order addresses based on most recent+frequent
> use, so that the most recently used one shows up first.
>

So I guess this ordering should happen internally in notmuch-address,
right? Perhaps as a new type of "--sort" option like "--most-frequent"
or "--best-fit".

If this is the right way to do it, perhaps I'll take a stab at it over
the next days. If it's not the right way to do it, please let me know so
that I don't do useless things! :)

> The problem I have, though, is that for some reason that I don't
> understand the interface can use To: address, or From: addresses, but
> not both.  This is by far the most annoying thing to me, since in both
> scenarios there will end up being missing addresses that I need that I
> then have to go search for manually.  If the interface could be
> configured to return most From: and To: address that would be a big
> improvement imho.
>

Hmm, I've never used this interface but if you are talking about the
"--output" switch I see that they can be combined. So like you can do:

           $ notmuch address --output sender --output recipients jameson 

to combine both To: and From:.

Best of luck!