<!DOCTYPE page
[<!ENTITY % balsa SYSTEM "balsa.entities"> %balsa; ]>
<page xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/1.0/" type="topic"
id="ab-conf">
  <info>
    <link type="guide" xref="index" />
  </info>
<title>Address Book Configuration</title>
  <p>This is to be filled in.</p>

<section id="CHOICE">
  <title>Address book type</title>
  <p>You can choose among several address book types.</p>
</section>

<section id="EXTERN">
<title>External address book</title>
<!-- Balsa support for an external query addressbook -->
<!-- By Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer@nl.linux.org>        -->

<p>The balsa addressbook supports input from programs. Thus, you
can use (no importing needed!) for example your pine or mutt
addressbook. The mutt mailer (<link
href="http://www.mutt.org/">www.mutt.org</link>) uses an identical
system to retrieve addresses from programs.</p>

  <section id="extern-existing-programs">
   <title>Existing programs</title>

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

<list>
<item><p>
<link href="http://www.spinnaker.de/lbdb/"
       type="http">http://www.spinnaker.de/lbdb/</link> - 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.
</p></item>

<item><p>
<link href="http://www.fiction.net/blong/programs/mutt/">http://www.fiction.net/blong/programs/mutt/</link>
 - palm address database, ldapsearch wrapper, ph/qi server, UIUC, ph,
</p></item>
</list>
</section>

<section id="extern-load-scripts">
<title>Writing your own load scripts</title>

<p>&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:</p>
<p><output>
e-mail address	full name	nickname
</output></p>

<p>The three fields should be separated 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. </p>

<p>&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.</p>

<p>All characters are allowed, except the tab (\t), since that
is the field separator.
</p>

<p>An example output could be:</p>
<p><output>
lbdbq: 3 matches
</output></p>
<p><output>
balsa-list@gnome.org	Balsa List	balsa-list
</output></p><p><output>
jelmer@nl.linux.org	Jelmer Vernooij	jelmer
</output></p><p><output>
balsa-maintainer@theochem.kth.se	Pawel Salek	balsa-maintainer
</output></p>


<note><p>Your script/program should write its output to stdout and not
to stderr!
</p></note>
</section>

<section id="extern-save-scripts">
<title>Writing your own save scripts</title>

<p>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').</p>

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

<p>Comments are welcome:
<link href="mailto:jelmer@nl.linux.org">jelmer@nl.linux.org</link></p>
</section>
</section> <!-- EXTERN -->
</page>
