I really enjoy using Mutt as my email client. However, sometimes I have to log
into my Gmail account to view my contacts. Tired of this, I exported my Gmail
contacts and imported them into abook.

Now I can view my Gmail contacts in Mutt.

Here’s how I did it:

(Sorry, no cut and paste instructions.)

* Export your Gmail contacts in the vcard format

* Download the abook source and patch it with the vcard diff (available on the abook website). NOTE: you can also use the vcard2abook.pl script available in the contrib/ dir in the source.

* Import your contacts by invoking abook with the following options: ‘–convert –informat vcard –infile INPUT.vcf –outformat abook –outfile ~/.abook/addressbook’

* Configure your abook (see `man abookrc`). abook has sane defaults so your config file can be very minimal:

set www_command=elinks
set add_email_prevent_duplicates=true

* Next, configure mutt to interact with abook. I added the following lines to my muttrc
set query_command=”abook –mutt-query ‘%s'”
macro index,pager A “abook –add-email-query” “add the sender to the address book”

That’s all :). Press A while in Mutt to add a contact and Q to query the address book.