lbdb and mutt

I recently added an outgoing mail filter to capture the email addresses of people I write email to. This saves me time on adding them to my address book manually.

I ran into Mark’s Mutt Fan and Tip page and was pleased by the description of lbdb. I then found a way to write an outgoing filter to capture email addresses as I send mail… I wasn’t really interested in lbdb holding the forged SPAM addresses.

The first script will pass emails to lbdb and sendmail.

$ cat bin/mysendmail 
#!/bin/bash
tee >(lbdb-fetchaddr -a)|/usr/lib/sendmail -oem -oi $@

aside: I never knew about the >() and <(), but ever since I read the above article, I've been using it a lot with git.
For example: vimdiff <(git-cat -r old-revision somefile) somefile.

This script corrects for the fact that lbdbq shows entries in the reverse order… I want the most recent to be on top.

$ cat bin/mylbdbq 
#!/bin/bash
(lbdbq "$@" | tee >(head -n 1 >&2) 2>/dev/null | grep -v ^lbdbq:.*matches | tac) 2>&1

BTW, if there is a better way to reverse the order of lines 2..N in bash, please let me know. I realize the above is ugly.

Finally, this is the mutt configuration.

$ grep -e mysendmail -e mylbdbq .muttrc
set sendmail="~/bin/mysendmail"
set query_command="~/bin/mylbdbq %s"

Now you have to write some email and populate your .lbdb/m_inmail.list file.

Finally when your lbdb is non-empty you can use ctrl-t on the address entry line to complete from lbdb. Pressing TAB will complete from the mutt_aliases file as before.