Re: Questions on completion

[Roland Winkler]

On Thu Nov 2 2017 Basil L. Contovounesios wrote:
> I would be grateful for clarification on the intended use of
> and differences between the fields aka, mail-aka and
> mail-name.  Could aka, which is already supported by
> bbdb-complete-list, be used instead of or in addition to
> mail-name for the purpose I describe?  For example,
> including the value of mail-name in the aka field permits
> both completion on and formatting of the Latinised name.

The aka field holds a list of names.  I see its main purpose for
identifying incoming mail, where the same person may appear with
different names.  In principle, you could use aka for what you want,
though I am not sure I wanted to recommend that, as you are
concerned about outgoing mail.

mail-aka is right now not really used for anything.  The mail
addresses in a record can also be in "full format".  Say for John
Smith something like

   Joe <address@hidden>

So this name in the mail address need not match the name of the
record.  Then the list mail-aka holds the element "Joe".

mail-name is used for outgoing mail if an address for John Smith is
just of the form address@hidden  This seems to be what you want /
need.

Maybe I should allow the possibility that both mail-name and
mail-aka can become elements of bbdb-completion-list.  Then in the
latter case, if you type a name that appears as mail-aka in a record,
this would yield the mail address with this mail-aka name (say, for
a record that holds five mail addresses, the last one being "Joe
<address@hidden>", typing Joe would complete to this last address).

> I just realised that passing the candidates to
> bbdb-mua-summary-unify is an unnecessary remnant from when I
> was using EUDC as an interface to BBDB, as bbdb-dwim-mail
> already uses bbdb-mail-name.

Yes, bbdb-mail-name is only used there.