Use Mutt with Your Address Book Contacts

Mutt is one of the best email clients out there, it’s fast, efficient, you can keep your fingers on the keyboard, it has key bindings and macros, threading, regular expression, pattern matching and more.

With a little tweaking you can get Mutt to also integrate into the Mac environment, for example here’s how you can get Mutt to use your contacts in your Address Book:

1. Install the Little Brother’s Database (lbdb) (we’re gonna use MacPorts, if you haven’t installed it first do that) and do the command:
   sudo port install lbdb
2. Modify the lbdb’s configuration so that it uses the Address Book by opening the lbdb.rc file in /opt/local/etc/ and change the following lines: (line 43) # METHODS="m_inmail m_passwd m_finger" To this:
   METHODS="m_muttalias m_osx_addressbook"
   and uncomment (delete the # on the beginning of the line) the following lines (68-69):
   #MUTT_DIRECTORY="$HOME/.mutt"
#MUTTALIAS_FILES=”.muttrc .mail_aliases muttrc aliases”
3. Modify Mutt’s configuration:
   open your ~/.muttrc file and in it put:
   set query_command ="/opt/local/bin/lbdbq '%s'"

And you’re done, restart Mutt, compose a new email, start to type the first characters of a contact’s name or email address and press Command-T, select a contact and continue your email.

[Via:macosxhints.com(modified to work with lbdb MacPort)]