Using the Address Book

Mutt allows you to determine who you'd like to send the message to either before or after launching your text editor to compose the message. You are free to type in the entire email address, of course, but that isn't very effective. To access the addresses you have stored in your mutt address book, simply hit the tab key at any point where an address is requested of you. If you type a couple of letters before hitting tab, mutt will limit the entries in the address book to those that match (`eri' will match Ericka, Erico, Erik, Erin, and so on). Navigate to the address you want or hit the forward slash key to search for one, and press Return to have that address be added to the list. You can select multiple addresses using the space bar.

While looking at the message index you can view the sender's email address by pressing the @ key. On the status line at the bottom of the screen you should see the sender's complete email address. Hit `a' to add that sender to your address book. You will be asked to confirm the name and email address of the sender (which is a great time to modify it for your own purposes if you'd like to do so).

In the context of more complicated programs that integrate the address book with other software (like instant messaging clients: Kontact/Kmail/Kopete on Linux and Addressbook/Ichat/Mail on Apple Mac OS X), the rudimentary mutt address book is somewhat of a disappointment. It is simply a text file containing a list of names and email addresses organized by aliases (nicknames) that you assign them. Each entry, one per line looks like this:

alias randall_wood Randall Wood <rwood@therandymon.com>
alias dogcito Dogcito and Oso <dogcito@zafiro.com>

You can add additional entries as described above, edit the text file directly any way you like, or try integrating an add-on address book with a bit more functionality. In section 3.5 I'll discuss how to configure the mutt address book, and in 3.5.2 below I'll discuss how to interface with more powerful address book components.