How do you handle contacts? I'd like to have a gmail-like setup i.e., autocomplete based on the people that I've written to or have written to me in the past.

There are some ugly hacks in notmuch to accomplish this, which I don't understand, since it should be quite easy to achieve. In fact mu provides it, and they both use xapian as a backend.

I use BBDB, the standard contact manager package. Version 3 is much better! It does all the autocompletion stuff you could want.

As far as I know there's no integration with notmuch, though. That's not too much of a problem, however, since the only thing you're missing there is the ability to create new contacts automatically from received messages. But you're almost certainly reading new messages in Gnus (where BBDB contact creation works), not in Notmuch.

Can it show addresses to autocomplete even if you don't have created contacts for them?

That's what I want to achieve, and what is currently possible with mu (and notmuch, but through an ugly hack).

I like treating contacts like favorites. I don't manage any, and let my email client / web browser handle them based on frequency.

No, BBDB doesn't maintain separate lists of "real contacts" and "seen addresses". On the other hand, contact creation is cheap, and can be totally automated to happen behind the scenes, without your involvement, so the effect can be similar.

Google nottoomuch. You and others asked, and like me, I felt pain when moving away from mu because it is built into the binary. These scripts allow you to cahce a contact list that scavenges the databses for all email addresses. You can ignore stuff and do other fun stuff with it.

(Disclosure: I am very happy user of these scripts.)

http://www.guru-group.fi/~too/nottoomuch/nottoomuch-addresse...