luiznux / muttfilter.py

Per-contact FROM-email addresses for users of mutt and org-contacts.el

## -*- coding: utf-8;mode: org; -*- ## Time-stamp: <2016-08-29 18:13:55 karl.voit> ## This file is best viewed with GNU Emacs Org-mode: http://orgmode.org/

Modifying FROM-email address in mutt emails

This script is using Emacs Org-mode Org-contacts together with the MUA mutt.

Let’s take a look at an example Org-contacts entry which looks like that:

** Bob Simpson                :research:chi09:BobSimpson:
:PROPERTIES:
:TYPE:
:TITLE: Dr.
:EMAIL: [e-mail]
:oldEMAIL: [e-mail]
:URL: http://example.com/bob
:MOBILE:
:HOMEPHONE:
:WORKPHONE:
:PHONE:
:COMPANY: This cool research company
:STREET: 42 Weirdstreet
:POSTALCODE: 12345
:CITY: Denver
:COUNTRY: USA
:PHOTOGRAPH: [[photo:BobSimpson.jpg]]
:BORN: 1970-12-31
:ITOLDTHEM_EMAIL: [e-mail]
:ITOLDTHEM_ADDRESS:
:ITOLDTHEM_PHONE:
:ADDRESS_CHANGE_METHOD: email
:CREATED:  [2015-01-30 Fri 17:51]
:END:

:

- first contact: CHI conference 2009
  - we had a nice lunch time together

Whenever I write an email to Bob (property :EMAIL:), I would like to use [e-mail] (property :ITOLDTHEM_EMAIL:) instead of my standard email address.

This way, I can give away contact-specific email addresses. That’s quite handy when you’ve got a catch-all email domain or you are using some more or less hidden features of cloud-based email services.

How does it work? How do I install it?

Using mutt as email client, you can define your own editor. For me, I like to compose emails using gVim. Therefore, my .mutt config file usually contains the line:

set editor=vim

If you replace this line by …

set editor="/usr/bin/python /home/USER/bin/muttfilter.py"

… you can use this script as a wrapper function. It parses your Org-mode file for contacts, extracts their email addresses, and your corresponding from-addresses. It compares the first from-address from your current email and does a look-up. If it finds a corresponding pair of entries in your Org-contacts file, the FROM:-address gets replaced by the address of your choice.

After this, the gVim editor is opened to let you compose your email as usual.

For debugging purposes, a log-file gets written to LOGFILENAME (see code!) which is removed when no error occured. Please modify its path if you got security concerns about that.

You might also take a look at following variables and adapt them to your requirements:

• TMPFILENAME: path to temporary file
• ORGCONTACTSFILE: path to your Org-mode file containing the org-contacts-entries
• DEFAULT_EMAIL_ADDRESS: your default email address
• EDITOR: your default editor

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