alias -group

[Frank Ursel]

Hi,

given:

| alias girl jane doe jane...@example.org
| alias guy john doe john...@example.org
| alias otherguy joo doe joo...@example.org

so long, nothing special.

Now I can have a aliasgroup:

| alias friends girl, guy

So I can write a mail to 'friends', which expands to girl and guy, which
expands to jane and john @example.org. Great.

Now I want them to join a named group, too.

| alias -group friendsgroup friends girl, guy

which doesn't work. The alias firends is working, indeed. But the named
group friendsgroup doesn't match john or jane doe but girl and guy if,
for example. I search for the group with %Lfriendsgroup.

The only solution I could find was, to speficy the aliases as shown with
girl and guy and an alias -group with the same addresses I specified
before. So this is doubled work, error prone and sucks. Is there an
alternative way to have an alias and a named group specified? Or is it a
bug in mutt? At least I would have expected to have the alias -group
command create a named group matching the final emailadresses and not the
aliases.

Frank

[Kai Burghardt]

Hello,

On 2011-12-01, Frank Ursel <sexyspa...@trash-mail.com> wrote:
> Now I want them to join a named group, too.
>
>| alias -group friendsgroup friends girl, guy
>

> which doesn't work. [...] Or is it a bug in mutt?

If I were a programmer of mutt, I wouldn't allow to define a group by
specifying another group. That's just to prevent recursive definitions.

Due to the man of mutt, mutt doesn't have bugs. It might have fleas but
never bugs. (x.X)

As you did so I've also experienced a strange behaviour of the -group
option: namely it does nothing.

So the only way I see for your issue is to define trees of aliases:

# close friends
alias girl jane joe <jane...@example.org>
alias guy john...@example.org (john doe)
alias friends girl guy

# some other guys
alias otherguy joo...@example.org
alias workmate mr.sm...@springfieldnuclearpwrplant.tld
alias aquaintance otherguy workmate

# group of groups
alias everybody friends aquaintance

Does this help you? (just quite two years later). If you have the
knowledge and infrastructure I advise to use a more central way such
defining aliases on your email-server or the usage of mailing-lists.
--
Yours Sincereley
Kai Burghardt