137: Why doesn't Emacs expand my aliases when sending mail? * You must separate multiple addresses in the headers of the mail buffer with commas. This is because Emacs supports RFC822 standard addresses like this one: To: Willy Smith <wks@xpnsv.lwyrs.com> However, you do not need to separate addresses with commas in your .mailrc file. WARNING: Emacs breaks up aliases in the .mailrc file into multiple addresses both on commas and on whitespace, regardless of any use of quotes. This is probably a bug. You can get around this by directly setting the value of mail-aliases. * Emacs normally only reads the ".mailrc" file once per session, when you start to compose your first mail message. If you edit .mailrc, you can type "M-ESC (build-mail-aliases) RET" to make Emacs reread .mailrc. (You have to include the parentheses where they are shown!) * Emacs does not interpret vendor-specific additions to the format of the .mailrc file such as the "source" command. It also ignores any "set" commands. The only commands it looks at are "alias" and "group" commands. * If you like, you can expand mail aliases as abbrevs, as soon as you type them in. To enable this feature, execute the following: (add-hook 'mail-setup-hook 'mail-abbrevs-setup)