Emacs Mail Address Completion

Seong-Kook Shin

I don't use Emacs for reading mails. All of my mail servers uses IMAP, and for productivity, Emacs as a mail client is too slow. It's kind of sad. However, sending e-mail in Emacs (M-x mail) speed up my daily work greatly. Normally, I discuss some code within Emacs, and for the reference, I send the code fragment or org file to the discussioners. ('discussioner' is not an English word. I don't know any word for it.)

The problem is, I usually don't remember mail address for people. Had I used graphical mail agent such as thunderbird or outlook, I would be pleased to see the auto-completion feature of them. But no such luck in Emacs. (Yes I know there are couple of Emacs packages that analyze mail boxes to extract the mail addresses, but none makes me comfortable enough. Those who want it anyway, see BBDB)

All I want is, to use my gmail contacts as address completing candidates.

So I wrote very simple Ruby script, to extract the contact information from my gmail account, and save it as contacts.el using following command:

$ cd $HOME/.emacs.d
$ ./gcontact.el MY-GMAIL-ACCOUNT@gmail.com
password: ********
$ _

Then add following code to your init script:

(defun complete-contact-address-internal ()
  (let ((name (completing-read "address: "
			       my-google-contacts
			       nil 'confirm)))
    (if (string-match "@" name)
	name
      (let ((found (assoc name my-google-contacts))
	    (nam (if (string-match "\\(.*?\\) *([^)]*) *$" name)
		     (match-string 1 name)
		   name)))
	(format "%s <%s>" nam (cdr found))))))

(defun complete-contact-address (&optional arg)
  (interactive "P")
  (let ((address (complete-contact-address-internal))
	(pos (point)))
    (save-restriction
      (save-match-data
	(goto-char (point-min))
	(re-search-forward (regexp-quote mail-header-separator)
			   (point-max) t)
	(beginning-of-line)
	(let ((header-sep (point)))
	  (if (>= pos header-sep)
	      (progn
		(goto-char (point-min))
		(re-search-forward "^To:" header-sep t))
	    (goto-char pos))
	  (beginning-of-line)
	  (if (or (re-search-forward "^[^[:blank:]][^:]*:[[:blank:]]*$"
				     (line-end-position) t)
		  (re-search-forward "^[[:blank:]]+$" (line-end-position) t))
	      (insert address)
	    (beginning-of-line)
	    (re-search-forward "[,[:blank:]]*$" (line-end-position) t)
	    (replace-match (format ", %s" address))))))))

(eval-after-load "sendmail"
  '(progn
     (define-key mail-mode-map [(meta return)] 'complete-contact-address)

     (let ((contacts (concat (file-name-as-directory user-emacs-directory)
			     "contacts.el")))
       (when (file-exists-p contacts)
	 (load-file contacts)))))

When writing e-mail in Emacs using M-x mail, press M-RET to auto-completing mail address.

Emacs mail address completion

Listing of gcontract.rb:

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