mailabbrev.el, mailalias.el and related package

[Luc Teirlinck]

I am a little bit concerned about the way I (mis)formulated certain
things in my original message.  Expressions such as, for instance,
"these and plenty of related bugs" may give the (mistaken) impression
that the mailabbrev code is just totally littered with bugs, which
would be unfair to the author.  I apologize if this is the impression
I created.  While it is true that there actually are plenty of bugs
related to mailabbrev, they all originate from a limited number of
problems with the mailabbrev code.  These problems nearly all concern
the interaction between mailabbrev and sendmail-mailalias (that
interaction is tricky, that is exactly why I would prefer one unified
system), as well as interactions between mailabbrev and other parts of
Emacs.  I am not familiar with the exact history of mailabbrev.el, but
if it were actually not originally written for Emacs, but would
instead be an adaptation of a package written originally for XEmacs,
then this would explain a lot of things that otherwise seem strange to
me.  Except for the bugs, which are nearly all interaction problems
with the rest of Emacs, the original mailabbrev.el is actually is a
very useful package.  I believe however that it can only be made to
interact well with the rest of Emacs by making some fundamental
changes of the type I made.  As mentioned before, in spite of these
changes, my rewrite preserves a lot of the original mailabbrev code.