[MlMt] A Few Questions/Suggestions

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 1 Nov 2016, at 20:37, Claire Connelly wrote:

> * nmh has a cool way of handling to to/from fields when you're looking 
> at lists of messages.  Instead of showing them as separate columns, it 
> has one column that shows you who a message is from _unless the 
> message is from you_, in which case it shows who you sent the message 
> to.

Someone else already replied to this part. This should be the equivalent 
of the “Correspondent” column in MailMate. Note that this is also 
available in searches and smart mailboxes, e.g., you can search for the 
address of a specific correspondent without specifying the address 
header. The “opposite” (your own identities) are available via 
“Identity” (although this one is not available as a column by 
default).

>  The `scan(1)` format code for that is
>
>         %<(mymbox{from})%<{to}To:%14(friendly{to})%>%>

I actually didn't know about this format (or I forgot). It's very 
similar to what MailMate can do.

> * nmh also allows you to define arbitrary "aliases" for sending mail; 
> allowing you to use whatever name you choose for a recipient (they see 
> the defined value, not the alias), set up your own mailing lists, and 
> so on.  Thus I could send to "andy" instead of having to type out 
> "Andre" and look through possible completions.  Being able to see the 
> completions is great, of course, but if you send mail to people all 
> the time it's nice to be able to use your own alias for them.  (As a 
> bonus, you also get to choose a canonical address for them, instead of 
> having to pick from multiple addresses they might have used to mail 
> you.)

Something like this is supported via Contacts. If a contact has a 
nickname then this is also searched when looking for completions, but 
it's not included in the generated name/email address.

> In the "not inspired by nmh features" category, I found that it took 
> me quite a while to figure out how some of the filters worked, in part 
> because there are tons of variables and figuring out what they were 
> for any given message involved a lot of trial and error.  Is there any 
> way of showing a "debug panel" that gives you the values of all the 
> variables for a particular message?

No, but I certainly agree that the learning curve is too steep. It's an 
interesting idea to offer displaying all possible parsed values of the 
headers of a given message. I'll give that some thought.

> Related to that, it would be nice to have better documentation for the 
> mailbox name format options for submailboxes—I did find some mailing 
> list messages covering these, but it would be easier if they were in 
> the actual documentation.

Noted.

> Finally (!), earlier today, I had to send out a bunch of messages that 
> were basically the same except for a URL and the To address.  I tried 
> saving a message draft and then editing the draft message, but the 
> message went away when I sent the message (as I'd kind of expected).  
> I ended up copying one of the messages I'd sent to a new IMAP folder, 
> then editing the message file on the server to remove the extra 
> material.  That seems to work—I can now go to that folder, select a 
> message, and choose Edit as New Message, but it would be easier if you 
> could deliberately save a message as boilerplate without having to 
> edit it on the server.  (One of the issues I found was that when 
> editing the message, it appeared to have my signature as expected, but 
> when I sent the message, MailMate added another copy of the signature 
> on the end.  So I edited the saved message and removed the signature 
> bits from it.)

If I understand correctly then I guess you should have duplicated the 
draft instead (most easily done by doing copy/paste, that is, hitting 
⌘C followed by ⌘V).

Undocumented and maybe only used by me, MailMate does have some support 
for creating a draft with some template values inserted in the body. 
Combined with a bundle command this can be used to auto-generate emails 
based on some source to fill in the templated values. It's probably a 
bit too low level for your use case. It's also possible to autogenerate 
replies, but again, this is undocumented (and possibly also incomplete 
since I'm likely the only one using it at this point).

I hope this answers most of your questions.

-- 
Benny