Address Database Help

The Address Database is provided to help you automatically track names and email addresses and to perform lookups of partial names and addresses.

Storing data in the Address Database

You can choose to make the address database self-maintaining or you can maintain it "by hand".

For a self-maintaining address database, set "Enable Address Saving" to "on" in the Address Database Preference panel. As you view mail messages the "From" address will be automatically extracted and a corresponding Address Database entry either created or updated.

You may also want to enable automatic deletion of old addresses. Each address in the database is marked with the date of the last message from that address. You can set a "Remove Old Entries" to "on" and set "Days until removal" to the maximum elapsed days from the last message from an address and your address database will be "self cleaning". Note that settings related to "Remove Old Entries" will be ignored if "Enable Address Saving" is not "on".

For a "hand maintained" address database, set "Enable Address Saving" to "off". When you are viewing a message with a sender whose address you wish to keep, press the key defined in the "Key to save an address" field (default is Ctrl-Tab).

Use of LDAP servers

You can also use addresses stored in an LDAP server.

You will need to have openldap installed on your system. Enabling LDAP requires that you add LDAP_Lookup to the "Expand Methods to use" field in the Address Database Preferences window. You will also need to provide the name of the LDAP server and the root for your LDAP search.

Address Expansion: using data from the Address Database

Note: Address expansion is only supported in the exmh Simple Editor (Sedit).

The Address Database can be used to help you address email by using the Sedit "<addrexpand>" key. That key defaults to Control-Tab but may be changed using the Binding.../Simple Edit menu item of the main exmh window.

Address expansion by Address Database lookup is performed by typing a partial name or address in your message (on the "To:", "cc:", "bcc:", or "dcc:" line) and pressing the "<addrexpand>" key. You can expand multiple names, one at a time, by typing a comma followed by another partial name or address and pressing the "<addrexpand>" key again.

The Address Database Browser

You can browse and edit your Address Database using the somewhat misnamed Address DB Browser. This is accessed from the Address.../Address Book menu item of the main exmh window.

Fine tuning your Address Database

People with multiple addresses
The Address Database does not attempt to recognize that one person can have multiple email addresses or email address variations. Each different address string is treated as a separate entity.
You can streamline lookup of people who send you mail from multiple addresses by using the "exclude" facility of the Address DB Browser. Select the address you normally use to send mail to the person and mark all other addresses as excluded. Do not delete the addresses you don't normally use for sending as they will just be added back in the next time you receive mail from that address.
Filtering
You may want to prevent mail from certain names such as "root" or mail stored in certain folders such as high-volume mailing lists from automatically causing updates to the Address Database. All email addresses listed as "Alternate-Mailboxes:" in your .mh_profile will be automatically ignored.
Filtering is controlled from the Address Database Preferences panel. If the "From" address for a particular message is not being updated due to your preference settings you can still force it to be stored by pressing the key defined in the "Key to save an address" preference setting. The default setting is Control-Tab.

Idiosyncrasies and limitations of the Address Database

The Address Database does not support lists of addresses, one entry can only contain one email address, you should use MH Aliases for lists of addresses.
The Address Database only supports expansion of partial addresses on email address lines of a message (i.e., the "To:", "cc:", "bcc:", "dcc:", "Redistribute-to", "Redistribute-cc" lines). Address expansion cannot be performed on continuation lines.
If you have set Sedit to break lines while typing and enter more than one address for expansion the line may be broken by Sedit. In this situation it will be necessary for you to temporarily turn off line breaking and join any continuation lines.
The Address Database maintains a pointer to the last mail message received for each entry. This pointer is only valid if you have not packed, moved, or deleted the message as it is only changed when you view a message.
Address database entries in the browser are initially sorted in alphabetical order by the text name and then by the email address.
However new entries are not sorted as they are added to the Address DB Browser. You will find new entries at the end rather than in their proper place in the alphabet. You may resort the list presented in the browser at any time using the Database.../Sort menu item.

Origins of the Address Database

The exmh Address Database code was originally written by Berry Kercheval and was inspired by BBDB, the Insidious Big Brother Database, an Emacs add-in.