BBDB

BBDB is a rolodex-like database program for GNU Emacs. BBDB stands for Insidious Big Brother Database, and is not, repeat, not an obscure reference to the Buck Rogers TV series.

It provides the following features:

• Tight integration with mail and news readers, with little or no interaction by the user:
  • easy (or automatic) display of the record corresponding to the sender of the current message;
  • automatic creation of records based on the contents of the current message;
  • automatic addition of data to arbitrary fields of the record corresponding to the sender of the current message.
• Listing all records which match a regular expression;
• Listing all records which match a regular expression in a particular field (`company' or `notes,' for example);

Installation

This program consists of ten files:

@bgroup@tableindent=1.5in

bbdb-Makefile

a makefile for compiling this with unix make

bbdb.texinfo

the source to this documentation

bbdb.el

implementation of the database

bbdb-com.el

most of the user-level commands

bbdb-vm.el

interface to VM (View Mail)

bbdb-rmail.el

interface to Rmail

bbdb-gnus.el

interface to GNUS

bbdb-mhe.el

interface to MH-E (Mail Handler)

bbdb-hooks.el

other optional functionality

defsubst.el

an inline-function facility (speed hack)
This file is unnecessary if you have my byte-compiler

@egroup

Put all of these files in some directory in your load-path, and byte-compile them. (If you don't compile these files, the BBDB will be so slow as to be virtually unusable.)

You can compile everything with the shell command

make -f bbdb-Makefile all 

but that won't work if you don't have VM. In that case, you can instead say

make -f bbdb-Makefile rmail vm mhe gnus

(omitting the names of any packages you don't want to bother with). You will undoubtedly need to change some of the parameters at the top of the Makefile (see the comments there).

Put the following forms in your `.emacs' file.

(autoload 'bbdb         "bbdb-com" "Insidious Big Brother Database" t)
(autoload 'bbdb-name    "bbdb-com" "Insidious Big Brother Database" t)
(autoload 'bbdb-company "bbdb-com" "Insidious Big Brother Database" t)
(autoload 'bbdb-net     "bbdb-com" "Insidious Big Brother Database" t)
(autoload 'bbdb-notes   "bbdb-com" "Insidious Big Brother Database" t)

If you want to take advantage of the VM features of the BBDB, then add the form (require 'bbdb-vm) to your `~/.vm' file.

If you want to take advantage of the RMAIL features of the BBDB, then add the following line to your `.emacs' file:

(setq rmail-mode-hook '(lambda () (require 'bbdb-rmail)))

If you want to take advantage of the MH-E features of the BBDB, then add the following line to your `.emacs' file:

(setq mh-folder-mode-hook '(lambda () (require 'bbdb-mhe)))

If you want to take advantage of the GNUS features of the BBDB, then add the following line to your `.emacs' file:

(setq gnus-Startup-hook '(lambda () (require 'bbdb-gnus)))