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# Information Keys and the Info Alist

Mail header information keys are nuggets of information that Supercite extracts from the various mail headers of the original message, placed in the reply buffer by the MUA. Information is kept in the Info Alist as key-value pairs, and can be retrieved for use in various places within Supercite, such as in header rewrite functions and attribution selection. Other bits of data, composed and created by Supercite, are also kept as key-value pairs in this alist. In the case of mail fields, the key is the name of the field, omitting the trailing colon. Info keys are always case insensitive (as are mail headers), and the value for a corresponding key can be retrieved from the alist with the `sc-mail-field` function. Thus, if the following fields were present in the original article:

    Date: 08 April 1991, 17:32:09 EST
    Subject: Better get out your asbestos suit

then, the following lisp constructs return:

    (sc-mail-field "date")
    ==> "08 April 1991, 17:32:09 EST"

    (sc-mail-field "subject")
    ==> "Better get out your asbestos suit"

Since the argument to `sc-mail-field` can be any string, it is possible that the mail field will not be present on the info alist (possibly because the mail header was not present in the original message). In this case, `sc-mail-field` will return the value of the variable `sc-mumble`.

Supercite always places all mail fields found in the yanked original article into the info alist. If possible, Supercite will also places the following keys into the info alist:

`"sc-attribution"`
  the selected attribution string.
`"sc-citation"`
  the non-nested citation string.
`"sc-from-address"`
  email address extracted from the ``From:'` field.
`"sc-reply-address"`
  email address extracted from the ``Reply-To:'` field.
`"sc-sender-address"`
  email address extracted from the ``Sender:'` field.
`"sc-emailname"`
  email terminus extracted from the ``From:'` field.
`"sc-initials"`
  the author's initials.
`"sc-author"`
  the author's full name.
`"sc-firstname"`
  the author's first name.
`"sc-lastname"`
  the author's last name.
`"sc-middlename-1"`
  the author's first middle name.

If the author's name has more than one middle name, they will appear as info keys with the appropriate index (e.g., `"sc-middlename-2"`, ...). See section Selecting an Attribution.

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