Re: Use BBDB for `rmail-output' ?

[Roland Winkler]

End of last week I already tried to reply to this thread, but my
message was eaten up by the friendly autoauthorizer at Gmane.org.
Now I try again via help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org, though I may have
forgotten some details I wrote previously.

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On Fri, Jun 08 2018, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Robert Pluim <rpluim@gmail.com>
>> I suspect Xavier is talking about setting the output filename for
>> rmail-output based on a BBDB field.
>
> And rmail-output-file-alist doesn't help?

I am not an Rmail user.  What is a typical usage of
rmail-output-file-alist?  Reading the info node on Rmail Output, it
seems to me that the variable rmail-automatic-folder-directives is
better suited "to take inspiration from BBDB".  The latter variable
reminds me of vm-auto-folder-alist that BBDB can populate
automatically.  Essentially, the idea is to give each BBDB record a
field vm-folder (or rmail-folder), the value of which is the name of
the folder where you want to put the messages for this person (that
is, the messages having an email address of that person in the From
or To header).  Then BBDB takes the email addresses of the BBDB
record of that person to construct a regexp that is added to
vm-auto-folder-alist, just like REGEXP in the docstring of
rmail-automatic-folder-directives.

So: it seems to me it would make sense to add similar code to BBDB
that can populate rmail-automatic-folder-directives.  (Maintaining
vm-auto-folder-alist by hand can be rather painful, and
rmail-automatic-folder-directives is probably be similar in that
respect.)

Maybe there are also scenarios where BBDB could help with
rmail-output-file-alist.