3.4 Address Book

Mew provides an address book ("~/Mail/Addrbook). The address book has 2 formats. One specifies expansion rules, while the other defines personal information.

First, let's look at the format that specifies expansion rules.

<shortname>: <address1>[, <address2>, <address3>,...]

In this way, you should specify a short name and a full address separated by ‘:’. If you want to expand the short name to multiple addresses, you can delimit them with a comma ‘,’. (This is exactly same as addresses delimited by ‘,’ in the To: field, for instance.) A space SPC is allowed after the comma ‘,’. For example:

pooh:           winnie-the-pooh@example.net
piglet:         piglet@example.org
friends:        pooh, piglet

Next, the format to define personal information is shown below:

<shortname> <address1>[, <address2>, <address3>,...] <nickname> <fullname>

In this way, four elements are separated by SPC.<shortname> is a short name. <nickname> and <fullname> are the person's nickname and full name, respectively. (For proper usage of the nickname, please refer to See section Summary mode and/or See section Draft mode.)

The second element is the addresses. If the person has multiple addresses, delimit them using ‘,’. SPC is allowed after ‘,’, which means that it does not function as the delimiter. SPC surrounded by quotes ‘"’ also has no delimiting function here. For example:

kazu    kazu@example.org, kazu@example.net    Kazu-kun  "Kazuhiko Yamamoto"

In the personal information format, you can omit any element. When you want to omit an intermediate element, specify ‘*’. The following is an example to define nicknames for addresses.

*       kazu@example.org, kazu@example.net    Kazu-kun

The nickname is used to replace addresses in Summary mode and to replace the citation prefix (See section Signature and citation) in Draft mode.

The comment letters are ‘;’ and ‘#’. ‘;’ is valid only when it appears at the beginning of lines, resulting in the disregarding of the entire line. The comment marker ‘#’ is valid everywhere. The strings between ‘#’ and the end of the line are ignored. Also, ‘\’ means a continuous line.

Summary mode includes the feature of directly registering the information of the current message into Addrbook. To register a expansion rule, type ‘C-cC-a’.

#If you want to register this entry, type 'C-c C-c'.
#If you want to NOT register this entry, type 'C-c C-q'.
Shortname: kazu
Addresses: kazu@example.org
Comments: 

To register personal information, type ‘C-uC-cC-a’.

#If you want to register this entry, type C-c C-c.
#If you want to NOT register this entry, type C-c C-q.
Shortname: kazu
Addresses: kazu@example.org
Nickname: 
Name: Kazuhiko Yamamoto
Comments: 

Add or modify the information if necessary. To register this information, type ‘C-cC-c’. To quit the registration, type ‘C-cC-q’. You should also refer to See section Give me a break.

If you want to use characters of multiple languages, put the following onto the beginning of Addrbook.

#-*-coding:ctext;-*-

This document was generated by U-X61T\saito on June, 6 2008 using texi2html 1.78.