* David T-G <davidtg-muttusers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2003-09-09 06:17]:
> ...and then David Rock said...
> %
> % > % problem is actually simpler than I thought. Just create a script to walk
> % > % the directory for .qmail-extension and build the alternates dynamically
> % > % from that.
> % >
> % > That's a start, but it is not sufficiently encompassing.
> %
> % I see that now. dang.
>
> Now perhaps you can see more why I was smiling ;-)
Yeah, just a little.
> Yep. Or I can, without any prior preparation, tell the marketer from
> ACME that my address is davidtg-acme (I love doing that; about one in
> three does a doubletake and thinks it's so amazingly coincidental that my
> email has his company name in it and usually asks if I work for that
> company :-) or sign up for the JCPenney sales list as davidtg-jcpenney.
Now THAT's funny. :-)
> % Hmm, I wonder if defaults could be picked up by a regex:
> % set
> alternates="(davidtg|davidtg-(muttusers|foo|bar|list-[a-zA-Z0-9]+))@domain"
> % and so on....
>
> Well, heck, I have that already.
>
> set alternates="(^davidtg(pager|work...|davidtg.*@justpickone|...)
>
> What I need is a way to match the stuff that doesn't start with davidtg
> and is somehow excludes (laura|madi|quin)tg.
Sounds like you need to define some subset of a finite list to work
with. (i.e. what prefixes DO you use...)?
davidtg, davetg, dtg ...
set alternates="(d|(dav(e|id)))tg-?(pager|work|.*)@justpickone"
That way you explicitly exclude addresses that are not you, but still
allow for sublists and defaults that ARE you. It becomes a question of
being pragmatic and recognizing where a process needs a little help when
it's too insane for one thing to do it all. If you make some small
concessions on what your address _could_ be, it makes it MUCH more
likely that something to auto-generate the alternates would work.
> % > 2) I might have my bigfoot mail handled by .qmail-bigfoot when it gets
> % > forwarded here but that doesn't mean that "davidtg-bigfoot@xxxxxxxxxx"
> % > should appear in my alternates list.
> %
> % You would probably have to maintain a list of excluded addresses to do
> % this (which would be tough with the above "catch everything" example).
>
> Well, as I think about it it wouldn't actually *hurt* to have that goofy
> thing in there; the thing we need is to have my old bigfoot address
> appear in the list as well. So that lets us have the manual list and
> then add to it with the script, which is fine. Forget excluded addresses
> and work with included addresses.
So I guess at this point the question is; do you have enough to put
something together, or do we need to keep rambling on about this? I
think with some minor restraint on your part in choosing addresses for
yourself e.g. all addresses start with david,dave,d,foo,whatever (keep
the davidtg-ACME type stuff, it's hilarious), provide a list of
addresses from other systems "manually" (read include list), you should
be able to do it.
--
David Rock
david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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