So, today I have made a neat little discovery. A while back I finally got tired of using mutt on two different machines and thunderbird/icedove on three different machines and trying to keep all the addressbooks synchronized. I took the plunge and setup an LDAP addressbook. This was fairly easy since I setup LDAP for user accounts last year and so adding an addressbook was a cinch.
So now I have one address book and all is more or less acceptable. Excpet that I have taken to using directoryassistant so that I can get to my LDAP addressbook while I use mutt. I finally got tired of that too, since that is hard to do over a very slow link (some places to which I travel only have dialup access) or when X forwarding isn't possible. Additionally, manual integration is definitely old-style. So I searched on Google for "mutt ldap addressbook" and found among the first page of links these: http://linsec.ca/Using_OpenLDAP_as_an_Address_Book http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20041024163030501 The first walks you through, step by step, how to setup so that you can query your LDAP addressbook from within mutt. I did a teeny bit of minor tweaking to suit my preferences. However, I was still left wanting since I could not figure out how query two (or more) completely different strings. I finally looked at some of the options and noticed that once you entered a query (using Q) and received results, you could append (using A) additional results to the same query. Cool. Now, how do you address a message to more than one recipient? That is where I experimented and found that mutt's tagging feature works quite nicely. You tag the recipients you want (using t, or T if you want to tag based on a pattern) and then hit the semicolon followed by 'm', and then bam! You are now addressing your message to multiple recipients. I then thought to myself, "what about if I want some people in the To line and some others in the Cc line?" I was stumped. Nothing I tried got me to where I could tell it to put some in the To line and others in the Cc line. Oh well. So, I started to read the next link (the macosxhints link above) to see if there were any other gems I had missed. That was when I discovered this paragraph, near the end: Thats it! Restart mutt. Now to use it, simply start addressing a new message, type a few characters of the name. Then type Control-T, and lbdb will query your mutt aliases file and your Mac OSX Address Book, looking for an approriate entry. Select an entry and continue with your message composition. I wasn't using the Max OS X addressbook, but I was interested in this Control-T combination. So, I tried it. I typed m to start a new message. I typed a few letters and hit Control-T and bam! I had some results from my LDAP address book. I picked a recipient. I typed a few more letters and hit Control-T again and bam! I had different results. I picked the next recipient. Then I hit enter to get the Cc line (I always have mutt ask me for Cc). I typed some letters and hit Control-T and (well, you get the idea). Now I could easily address a message to some people in the To line and others in the Cc line, all while drawing addresses from my LDAP addressbook. Of course, this wasn't enough for me. I though that it would be nice to be able to select recipients *after* typing the message. If you use the Q query approach, you can't do this. You can only choose recipients for the To line and you must choose prior to starting the message composition. However, with the Control-T approach, you can add or change recipients in the To, Cc and Bcc lines after you have finished composing, before you send. I have rambled on a fair bit now, but I just wanted to share my renewed admiration for mutt and its extensibility. Hopefully someone will find this helpful. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sánchez http://people.connexer.com/~roberto http://www.connexer.com
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