Balsa User's Guide
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# Address book configuration

This is to be filled in.

## Address book type

You can choose among several address book types.

## External address book

The balsa addressbook supports input from programs. Thus, you can use (no importing needed!) for example your pine or mutt addressbook. The mutt mailer (www.mutt.org) uses an identical system to retrieve addresses from programs.

### Existing programs

The following programs are compatible with the mutt mail reader and /should/ be with balsa. Submit links to more programs.

- http://www.spinnaker.de/lbdb/ - The little brother database. Read emailaddresses and names from: finger, /etc/passwd, incoming procmail email, NIS, fido, the abook program, mutt addressbook, pine addressbook, palm addressbook, gnomecard addressbook, big brother database, ldap database.

- http://www.fiction.net/blong/programs/mutt/ - palm address database, ldapsearch wrapper, ph/qi server, UIUC, ph,

### Writing your own load scripts

Balsa ignores the first line of output from your program. You might want to write comments or debug output on this line. The remaining lines should have this format:

`e-mail address full name nickname`

The three fields should be seperated by tabs. The third field is currently not used by balsa, but might be in the future. It is also kept to ensure compatibility with mutt.

Balsa executes your script with one argument: the pattern to search for. A space (" ") is used as the first argument when creating a list of all users.

All characters are allowed, except from the tab(\t), since that is the field seperator.

An example output could be:

`lbdbq: 3 matches`

`balsa-list@gnome.org Balsa List balsa-list`

`jelmer@nl.linux.org Jelmer Vernooij jelmer`

`balsa-maintainer@theochem.kth.se Pawel Salek balsa-maintainer`

Your script/program should write it's output to stdout and not to stderr!

### Writing your own save scripts

Adding addresses is also possible. Your script should receive 3 arguments. The first is an email address, the second a full name and the third is an alias (currently not used and replaced by 'TODO').

Note that mutt does not have support for adding addresses and there is thus no compatibility in this case.

Comments are welcome: `<jelmer@nl.linux.org>`

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