The Address Database is provided to help you automatically track names and email addresses and to perform lookups of partial names and addresses.
For the most part you can allow the Address Database to be self-maintaining.
Set "Enable Address Saving" to "on" in the Address Database Preference panel. As you view mail messages the "From" address will be automatically extracted and a corresponding Address Database entry either created or updated.
Note: Address expansion is only supported in the exmh Simple Editor (Sedit).
The Address Database can be used to help you address email by using the Sedit "<addrexpand>" key. That key defaults to Control-Tab but may be changed using the Binding.../Simple Edit menu item of the main exmh window.
Address expansion by Address Database lookup is performed by typing a partial name or address in your message (on the "To:", "cc:", "bcc:", or "dcc:" line) and pressing the "<addrexpand>" key. You can expand multiple names, one at a time, by typing a comma followed by another partial name or address and pressing the "<addrexpand>" key again.
You can browse and edit your Address Database using the somewhat misnamed Address DB Browser. This is accessed from the Address.../Address Book menu item of the main exmh window.
The Address Database does not attempt to recognize that one person can have multiple email addresses or email address variations. Each different address string is treated as a separate entity.
You can streamline lookup of people who send you mail from multiple
addresses by using the "exclude" facility of the Address DB Browser. Select the address you
normally use to send mail to the person and mark all other addresses
as excluded. Do not delete the addresses you don't normally
use for sending as they will just be added back in the next time you
receive mail from that address.
You may want to prevent mail from certain names such as "root" or mail stored in certain folders such as high-volume mailing lists from automatically causing updates to the Address Database. All email addresses listed as "Alternate-Mailboxes:" in your .mh_profile will be automatically ignored.
Filtering is controlled from the Address Database Preferences panel. If the "From" address for a particular message is not being updated due to your preference settings you can still force it to be stored by pressing the key defined in the "Key to save an address" preference setting. The default setting is Control-Tab.
If you have set Sedit to break lines while typing and enter more
than one address for expansion the line may be broken by Sedit. In
this situation it will be necessary for you to temporarily turn off
line breaking and join any continuation lines.
However new entries are not sorted as they are added to the Address DB Browser. You will find new entries at the end rather than in their proper place in the alphabet. You may resort the list presented in the browser at any time using the Database.../Sort menu item.
The exmh Address Database code was originally written by Berry Kercheval and was inspired by BBDB, the Insidious Big Brother Database, an Emacs add-in.