eMail Optimizations -- hannes-schulz.de

eMail Optimizations

Here I put some ideas and scripts roughly clustered around email handling.

procmail: filter incoming mail by address book

One of my favorite procmail recepies: It puts your mail in a folder depending on in which (mutt-) address book you keep the sender in:

For each address book (here: uni) you need on entry like the following in your .procmailrc:

1 :0:groups.uni$LOCKEXT
2 * ? echo ${SENDER} | grep -is -F "`eaextr ~/.mail_aliases.uni`"
3 groups.uni/
4

additionally you need the following perl script as eaextr in your path:

1 #!/usr/bin/perl -wn
2 s/^.*<(.*)>.*$/$1/;
3 print $1."\n";
4

Correct salutation added automatically

Ein wenig komplizierter: Die Anrede wird automatisch generiert, je nachdem an wen man eine E-Mail schreibt. Zum Beispiel steht in der E-Mail an max.mustermann@eliteuni.de gleich als erstes “Hallo Herr Prof. Mustermann,”. Das geht so:

This is a bit more complex: We generate the salutation at the beginning of the mail, depending on the recipient. For example, you have a mail to max.mustermann@eliteuni.de, then your mail will start with “Hallo Mr. Mustermann”.

In .muttrc add the line set editor="~/bin/vim-mutt"
The file ~/bin/vim-mutt will now be called as your editor. In it, you can define abbreviations, tell vim where to place the cursor at the correct position, and call the script which generates the salutation. Finally, we call vim:
1 # /usr/bin/vim-mutt
2 # define aliases for the people in your address books
3 sed -e 's/alias/iab/' ~/.mail_aliases* > ~/.vim_mutt_aliases
4
5 # let vim create the salutation
6 echo "silent! %!~/bin/mailtmpl.pl" >> ~/.vim_mutt_aliases
7
8 # place a mark above your name (which i assume is at the end
9 # of your standard mail template), so that you can skip to it
10 # if you do not have a makro to jump to <++> tags, delete this line
11 echo 'silent! exe "normal /^\\s*Your Name^Mkko<++>ESCgg/^$^M"' >> ~/.vim_mutt_aliases
12
13 # call vim
14 exec /usr/bin/vim -S ~/.vim_mutt_aliases $@
15
We now define a list .mail_titles, in which we place exceptions to the rule (first name only). Each line contains a pattern and a salutation type.
```
max.muster@stanford   hprof
meier                 herr
schulze               herr
tina.mustermann       frau
my.mom@web.de         Mom
```
Later, hprof will be replaced by Herr Prof. {Last name}, while “Mom” stays as it is.
We now need the script which generates the salutation: mailtmpl.pl (1.02 KiB). It reads the (empty) mail until it finds the To: line and tries to match it with the exceptions defined above. If it fails, it uses Hallo {First Name}.

Loosely related fun stuff

You might want to check out the following:

Echelon is a perl script which lets you add funny words to your emails to confuse people who do pattern-based email spying

lachnuss-zehn.de

weird stuff, unless you know what you're looking for