TITLE: Converting Alpine addressbook to Mutt aliases
DATE: 2018-12-23
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
====================================================================


Having switched to a finally usable Mutt setup, I wanted to be able 
to use my addressbook from Alpine in Mutt. I'm also trying to learn 
how to use regex, sed, awk, grep etc. so I thought this was a good 
chance.

Alpine's .addressbook looks like:

    Aidan   Aidan Dude  aidan.dude@email.com
    Alan_H  Alan Holey  alan.holey@email.com         Alans really 
unnecessarily long place of work
     : in a city I cantt spell 
    Cameron Cameron Green   cameron@gmail.com

I used a shell script like this, to manipulate this format into 
what Mutt likes:

    #!/bin/bash

    address=$(cat ~/.addressbook | grep -v "^ :") 

    book_length=$(echo "$address" | wc -l)

    rm ~/.mutt/aliases
    touch ~/.mutt/aliases

    # Create alias for start of every line
    alias=$(for i in `seq 1 $book_length`;
    do 
        echo 'alias '
    done)

    # Get nickname from addressbook
    nickname=$(echo "$address" | awk '{print $1}') 

    # Get full name from addressbook
    # everything before @, then before last space, then remove 
first word 
    fullname=$(echo "$address" | grep -o '^.*\S@' | gsed  
's/\S*$//g' | gsed 's/^\w*\ *//')

    # Get email address from addressbook
    # Get email address, then add space after comma
    email=$(echo "$address" | grep -E -o 
"\b\S+@\S+\.[A-Za-z]{2,6}\b" | gsed 's/, */, /g')

    opb=$(for i in `seq 1 $book_length`;
    do 
        echo '<'
    done)

    clb=$(for i in `seq 1 $book_length`;
    do
        echo '>'
    done)

    # Paste together
    paste  -d '\0' <(echo "$alias") <(echo "$nickname") <(echo 
"$fullname") <(echo "$opb") <(echo "$email") <(echo "$clb")  | gsed 
's/\s+*/ /g' > ~/.mutt/aliases 

The outputted alias file looks like this:

    alias Aidan Aidan Dude <aidan.dude@email.com>
    alias Alan_H Alan Holey <alan.holey@email.com>
    alias Cameron Cameron Green <cameron@gmail.com>

It also allows for multiple comma separated email addresses

I also found a way to use omnicompletion to let me search my Mutt 
aliases within vim when called from Mutt, so I can add them to the 
To: and CC: fields. The script is courtesy of 
https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2533.

  [https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2533]: 
Karsten%20B