Mailing lists with org-contact

Question

Premise: I am not an expert of emacs-lisp, unfortunately.

I am handling all my emails with mu4e, and since it integrates well with org-contacts, I use the latter to handle my address book. However, I have not yet figured out how to handle mailing lists with org-contacts. I know I can use aliases :

    (setq mail-personal-alias-file (expand-file-name "/path/email-aliases.txt"))

but I find this rather unsatisfying. Is there any other way to specify a mailing list in org-contacts to use in mu4e? I am pretty sure someone has already cooked up a solution for himself, but could not find anything on the web.

Answer 1

Finally, I did it myself, and I am posting it here to help people looking for a solution to my problem.

I decided to use tags to specify a group of emails, thus the same contact can be part of several groups simply by tagging it several times.

Here is an example of contacts file:

* John Doe   :MailingListA:GroupB:
:PROPERTIES:
:EMAIL: john.doe@example.com
:NICK:
:DESCRIPTION:
:BIRTHDAY:
:END:

* Nick Smith :GroupB:
:PROPERTIES:
:EMAIL: nick.smith@aaaa.bb
:NICK:
:DESCRIPTION:
:BIRTHDAY:
:END:

* Rick Armstrong :MailingListA:
:PROPERTIES:
:EMAIL: rick.armstrong@bbbb.dd
:NICK:
:DESCRIPTION:
:BIRTHDAY:
:END:

And here is the code for parsing it and putting it in the current buffer:

    (defun my-contact-extract-all (elem)
      (let ((lname (nth 0 elem))
            (ladd (cdr (assoc "EMAIL" (nth 2 elem)))))
        (concat lname " <" ladd ">")))

    (defun get-mailing-list-from-tag(tag) 
      (let ((my-list (org-contacts-filter nil tag nil)))
        (mapconcat 'my-contact-extract-all my-list ", ")))

    (defun org-contacts-get-list-from-tag (tag) 
      "Returns a string containing all addresses from all contacts with a certain TAG"
      (interactive "sEnter tag:")
      (message (get-mailing-list-from-tag tag))
      (insert (get-mailing-list-from-tag tag)))

If you have suggestion on improvements to my code, please post a comment below.