Enhanced mh-e [was: Re: Any (brave :-) mew users?]

Over a month ago, SL Baur <steve(a)vmailer.xemacs.org&gt; wrote: [ Chuck's been sent a separate message regarding this. ] Well, I made the glimpse code "modular", but the interface is one straight from hell: while the main search function has only three required parameters, there are fourteen (!) optional ones. Yuk. This is one time I wish elisp had keywords in function parameters (note: I am not, *not*, *NOT* advocating that we replace elisp with CL). Anyhow, a copy of my mangled mh-e is now available from the NMH web page (see the link, "extended mh-e", near the bottom): http://www.math.gatech.edu/nmh/ I didn't find the time to clean it up much, but I did write a long README file. It's appended to the end of this message. Side note: there's a typo in the README that says certain features work only with GNU Emacs. It's the other way around: certain features work only with XEmacs. ;-( Consider this package to be experimental. It's not to go into XEmacs until I get some feedback. Also, I may (or may not) do some code cleanup, as a lot of code was written a long time ago, before defadvice was widely available. -- Darryl Okahata Internet: darrylo(a)sr.hp.com DISCLAIMER: this message is the author's personal opinion and does not constitute the support, opinion, or policy of Hewlett-Packard, or of the little green men that have been following him all day. =============================================================================== Unofficial mh-e 5.0.2.1 Wed Jul 22, 1998 IMPORTANT: This is an unofficial release of mh-e 5.0.2. In particular, it is not sanctioned by the mh-e maintainer. It would be nice if these changes could be merged back into the official version, but the maintainer has been (justifiably) unable to do so, because I've been unable to find the time to get the legal paperwork done. As a result, I'm releasing what I currently have, in the hope that someone finds this useful. (Side note: at the request of the mh-e maintainer, I've prefixed new functions with "y-mh-" instead of "mh-".) Changes in this release include: * Significant performance improvements by intelligent caching of folder contents (scans). * Automatic generation of folder names when refiling messages, based upon email addresses. For example, messages from &quot;jdoe(a)foo.bar.com&quot; get a default folder name of "jdoe". Optional elisp functions can be written to return default folder names, if the existing features are insufficient. [ Other people have written similar features for mh-e, but I believe my version has been around the longest, although poorly publicized. ] * Automatic alias completion, based upon MH aliases, sendmail aliases, and /etc/passwd. When entering email addresses at the "To:" prompt, the TAB key can be used to do email address completion. [ Other people have written similar features for mh-e, but I believe my version has been around the longest, although poorly publicized. ] * (Optional) Automatic email address harvesting, for automatic email alias generation. Whenever a message is viewed, the sender's name/address can be automatically added to an internal database. The name/address is then available for alias completion. Harvesting can be done upon all folders, selected folders, or all folders but specified ones. Inspired by exmh (but, for some inexplicable reason, exmh doesn't make the address easily accessible for use in specifying "To:" & "cc:" addresses). NOTE: this particular feature only works with XEmacs. It will not work with GNU Emacs. [ Note: I'm obsoleting this capability, in favor of BBDB (see http://pw2.netcom.com/~simmonmt/bbdb/index.html). In particular, BBDB works with both XEmacs and GNU Emacs. Future releases (if any) will probably keep this code, but no new development will be done. BBDB does not yet work well with this package, but this will be fixed. ] * (Optional) Glimpse interface to index and search mail folders. The database scheme used is compatible with that used by exmh, so both exmh and this version of mh-e can share the same glimpse database. * Update mode line to turn off the "new mail" icon after doing an "inc". * Optional ability to visit new MH folders in new frames. Visiting an existing, but iconified, MH folder causes the frame to be un-iconified. * Optional ability to quit mh-e by iconifying the mh-e frame, instead of killing the mh-e buffers. * Enhanced signature file processing. An optional elisp function can be specified to return a signature. This is useful for writing a function that scans the draft to determine an appropriate signature. * A crude pull-down menu has been added to mh-folder buffers. It's a work-in-progress, and it really needs to be cleaned up. Nonetheless, it's still quite useful. INSTALLATION This version should work fine with the latest versions of both XEmacs and GNU Emacs. However, the automatic address harvesting feature will only work under GNU Emacs (which is one reason why this feature is being obsoleted in favor of BBDB). Installation instructions: * Extract these files into a convenient directory (it's strongly recommended that you put these files into a directory of their own, and not overwrite any existing files). Then, in your ~/.emacs, add this directory to the beginning of `load-path', like: (setq load-path (cons "/some/path/mh-e" load-path)) (assuming that you put these files into the directory "/some/path/mh-e".) * If you are using XEmacs and want to enable the automatic address harvesting feature, add the following line to your ~/.emacs: (require 'mh-address) (See, "Automatic Address Harvesting", below, for more instructions.) * If you have glimpse, you can enable glimpse support by adding the line: (require 'glimpse-mh-e) (See, "Glimpse Interface", below, for more instructions.) * See the section on "Other Notes", below, for miscellaneous information. * Restart Emacs and use mh-e normally. AUTOMATIC ADDRESS HARVESTING Whenever you read a message, it's possible for mh-e to automatically harvest the sender's name and email address and add it to a database. When composing a message, you then have easy access to this database (e.g., for address completion). Hooks also exist to limit harvesting. Addresses used for harvesting are taken from the "Reply-To:" header; if that doesn't exist, then "From:" is used. Hopefully, a name will be found along with the email address, as in the cases of: John Doe <jdoe(a)foo.bar.com&gt; jdoe(a)foo.bar.com (John Doe) If a name is found, that name is used to create an email alias, and the address is accessed via this alias name. If a name is not found, an alias name is constructed from the address. Here are some examples: Address Alias ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "John Doe" <jdoe(a)foo.bar.com&gt; John_Doe "JOHN DOE" <jdoe(a)foo.bar.com&gt; John_Doe "JOHN DOE" <jdoe(a)foo.bar.com&gt; John_Doe "DOE, JOHN" <jdoe(a)foo.bar.com&gt; Doe_John JOHNDOE <jdoe(a)foo.bar.com&gt; Johndoe jdoe(a)foo.bar.com (John Doe) John_Doe jdoe(a)foo.bar.com (Doe, John) Doe_John jdoe(a)foo.bar.com Jdoe Note that harvested addresses are accessed by the alias. The optional address harvesting feature, which only works in XEmacs, is enabled by adding the following line to ~/.emacs: (require 'mh-address) By default, harvested addresses are stored in the file, ".mh-e-address-book", in the MH mail directory. As most people have ~/Mail as their MH mail directory, harvested addresses will be stored in: ~/Mail/.mh-e-address-book Harvested addresses are saved when you quit a folder. Comments: * You can exclude all messages in certain folders from being used for address harvesting via the variable, `y-mh-scan-address-folders-exclude'. See the variable documentation for details. * You can limit address harvesting to selected folders via the variable, `y-mh-scan-address-folders-include'. * You can exclude certain addresses from being added to the database via the variable, `y-mh-suppress-address'. * You can exclude addresses by name via the variable, `y-mh-suppress-names'. This works only for those messages whose sender has a name with their email address, like: John Doe <jdoe(a)foo.bar.com&gt; jdoe(a)foo.bar.com (John Doe) GLIMPSE INTERFACE [ Tested only with glimpse 3.6. Unknown if 4.X works. ] The optional glimpse interface is enabled by adding the following line to your ~/.emacs file: (require 'glimpse-mh-e) The glimpse database is compatible with that used by exmh, which is where the inspiration for this originated. You can then use the following functions to search your MH folders (unfortunately, they're not yet bound to any key sequences): glimpse-mh-search glimpse-mh-search-verbose The function, `glimpse-mh-search-verbose' is like, `glimpse-mh-search', except that `glimpse-mh-search-verbose' will also ask you if you want to match whole words (always "yes", for `glimpse-mh-search') and the number of allowed errors per word (always zero, for `glimpse-mh-search'). IMPORTANT: Note that there is no user interface for indexing file folders. Before you can use glimpse to search your MH folders, you must first create a glimpse database. Note that you may need lots of disk space, as the glimpse indices can be as large as 10% or more of the folder sizes. For convenient, some scripts are included to assist with creating the glimpse databases: indexer This is a Bourne shell script that can be used to create the glimpse database. The list of folders to index is taken from the ".folders" file in the MH mail directory (in other words, typically "~/Mail/.folders"). This file will be created if it doesn't exist. You can run this script from any directory. Note that the MH "folders" command is not used to generate the list of folders; this is done because some people have more than the (default) maximum 300 folders (in MH 6.8), and not everyone uses nmh. To force the rebuilding of the ".folders" file, use the command "indexer -F". This script will always rebuild the glimpse index for a given folder, even though the folder contents may not have changed. As a result, this script can be slow. indexer.pl This is a perl 4 script (for maximum compatiblity) that does everything that the Bourne shell script does, plus much more. If you can use this script, use it instead of the Bourne shell one. This script will, unlike the Bourne shell one, only index those folders that have changed. It will also output status lines for each folder similar to those output by the exmh glimpse indexer. Like the Bourne shell script, this folder creates and uses a ".folders" file. To force the rebuilding of the ".folders" file, use the "-F" option. Note that this will also force the rebuilding of all glimpse indices, regardless of whether or not a folder has changed. The glimpse databases will be placed in a ".glimpse" directory in the MH mail directory (in other words, typically "~/Mail/.glimpse"); note that a separate directory will be created below this point for each folder. Comments: * You must (manually) build a glimpse database (using one of the supplied scripts, for example) before you can do a glimpse search. * As searching is done, the search progress is displayed in the modeline (the current folder being searched is displayed in the modeline). If you have lots of small folders, the amount of time it takes to update the modeline may become the limiting factor in the search time. You can control how the search progress is displayed via the variable, `glimpse-mh-display-search-progress'. * See the variable, `glimpse-mh-search-limits', for the default limits on the number of displayed matches. * Under XEmacs, in the glimpse results buffer, you can use button-2 on the mouse to select a message for display. Clicking on a message name (it'll highlight as you move the mouse over it) will cause the folder and message to be displayed. Alternatively, you can move the cursor over the message name and press [Return]. OTHER NOTES The 'TAB' key is used to do alias completion whenever you are prompted for an address. For the case where you have multiple possible completions, but the address you've entered so far is the one you want to use, press C-u before TAB; this will cause the alias for the current address to be used, regardless of whether or not additional expansions are possible. Here is a list of some useful configuration variables. Note that this list is not complete. Hopefully, their purpose can be inferred from their name. See the variable documentation for details: y-mh-quit-by-iconifying y-mh-visit-new-folder-in-new-frame y-mh-signature-func y-mh-always-flush-changes A variable controlling automatic default folder name when refiling: y-mh-auto-folder-alist Some variables controlling alias expansion: y-mh-read-aliases-from-passwd y-mh-alias-fully-expand-aliase y-mh-use-system-aliases Use the optional 'tm' package to handle MIME (tm is not included in this release). It works well with this one. However, note that alias completion will not work when forwarding messages, if tm is used. KNOWN PROBLEMS * Messages are always marked read-only. The original mh-e 5.0.2 allowed you to edit and save messages. * Pressing "e" or "x" (mh-execute-commands) in an mh-folder buffer that has no pending changes will make the message under the cursor be the current message, but the previously current message will not be unmarked (this will be seen when you pack/rescan the folder). * Texinfo documentation has not been updated. This file is all there is. * If you use 'tm', alias expansion does not work when forwarding a message. However, expansions will again work once you enter the draft buffer.