Ytdyklly

What options do I have for adding recipients to email when using mailx (or variations thereof)? The ones I know about are:

• Manually type email address character by character from memory


• Enter an alias that I have stored in .mailrc earlier

Are there other options like an address book created from email addresses I have sent email to earlier, that can be navigated with the cursor keys or narrowed down by auto-complete?

Forthrin, I could not find an elegant solution to this problem. But I did a little thinking, and a possible workaround would be outlined like this:

Make a directory called 'recipients', create dummy files named after the email addresses you desire to send to, use auto-complete inside this directory.

mkdir recipients

cd recipients

touch me@example.com

mail -s "stuff" 'me@example.com' < logfile.txt

Single quotes here to help avoid escaping the '' that would appear.

I know it's not pretty, but you could doll this up by pulling from a text file of email addresses and cobbling an auto-complete together that way. I'm unsure how to go about that, though. Someone smarter than me could chime in.

Further, you can scour your previous history and maillog to look at the mails you've already sent and grab those addresses, then toss them into the recipients folder. Now you have a folder of recipients with which tab completion will work (satisfying your auto-complete request).

Not the best solution, but I don't see any feature in mailx for address books.

A solution would be to use a wrapper to save addresses and bash completion to retrieve them:

address_book=${HOME}/.address

mailx() {

    #loop through all args 

    for i; do

        # does this look like an email address

        if grep -xqE '[[:alnum:]_.+-]+@[[:alnum:]-]+.[[:alnum:].-]+' <<< "${i}" && ! grep -xqF "${i}" "${address_book}"; then

            echo "${i}" >> "${address_book}"

        fi

    done

    /usr/bin/mailx "${@}"

}

_mailx_completion() {

    if [[ ! -f ${address_book} ]] ; then

        return

    fi

    # Only add each email once

    emails=($(grep -xvf<(echo "${COMP_WORDS[*]}"|tr ' ' 'n'))"${address_book}")

    if [[ ${#emails} -eq 0 ]] ; then

        return

    fi

    # list emails

    COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "${emails[@]}" "${COMP_WORDS[${COMP_CWORD}]}") )

}

complete -F _mailx_completion mailx

Add to your ‘.bashrc’

Explanation:

After running mailx, go through each argument passed to mailx and see if it looks like an email address and if it doesn't already exist then our "address book".

When on the command line the bash autocomplete will add the email addresses for you at the end after you press tab. This function ensures we are not adding the same email address multiple times.