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From: andrew@jung.harlqn.uucp (Andrew Watson)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Removing the pain of editing .mailrc
Message-ID: <1848@harlqn.UUCP>
Date: 1 Jun 89 17:52:30 GMT
Sender: news@harlqn.UUCP
Lines: 43

Being the popular chap that I am (:-), I find that I constantly need to edit my
.mailrc file to add aliases for new mail correspondents. Given that I use GNU
Emacs both to edit the .mailrc and send the mail, I have to remember to tell
the Emacs mailalias mechanism that I've been changing the world under its feet
by (setq mail-aliases t) every time. Eventually I got bored with this, and so
(with some help from John Sturdy) I put together the following few lines of
code to do the job automatically:

Define a couple of functions (in your .emacs, for example):
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
;;; Write hook function to do the job

(defun mailrc-reset ()
  (message "Reset aliases variable")
  (sit-for 1)
  (setq mail-aliases t)
  nil)     ; this is rather important!

;;; Small function to place the hook

(defun setup-mailrc-hook ()
  (make-local-variable 'write-file-hooks)  ; make it have a separate value here
  (setq write-file-hooks (cons 'mailrc-reset write-file-hooks)))

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
And then add the following lines at the end of the .mailrc to setup the hook
when the file is first visited ...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
# Local Variables:
# eval: (setup-mailrc-hook)
# End:

			       Regards,

                                   Andrew.

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