For almost 4 years, I used abook[1] together with mutt[2]. This
worked quite well. abook provided not only a database for e-mail
addresses, I also used it to implement a birthday reminder and to
resolve phone numbers to real names.
Now I read on the Arch Linux forums[3] about a user who replaced abook
with a custom script. Hmm. Why not do this as well? Indeed, abook had
several downsides. Hence, I did the same.
Key features of my approach:
1. Data is stored using JSON instead of abook's INI format. This
allows for much greater flexibility.
2. No graphical frontend in order to save code. JSON is simple
enough to write it manually.
3. Support for regular expressions in search queries.
4. Custom search behaviour (obviously). For example, imagine
searching for "uninformativ.de" in abook. What you'll get is not
only "
[email protected]" but also every other e-mail
address which is stored under my name. My script only returns
matching addresses -- even if the person owns additional e-mail
addresses.
5. Of course: Additional scripts implement a birthday reminder and
phone number lookup.
Maybe I'll push this to GitHub[4] some day.
____________________
1.
http://abook.sourceforge.net/
2.
http://www.mutt.org/
3.
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1088163#p1088163
4.
https://github.com/vain
