This is off-topic for Remind users, but Remind users are the kind of people who
I think would have clever ideas about this:
How do you store and manage a central personal list of contacts on Linux, in a
way that you can generate (1) your list of email aliases (e.g. for mutt), and
(2) your list of phone numbers and addresses (e.g. VCARDs for for your mobile
phone)?
Up to now, I have my usual file of email aliases, e.g.
alias remind "Remind Fans <[email protected]>"
and I have a separate mostly free-format file of single lines of names with
phone numbers and/or email addresses and/or random info, e.g lines like this:
John Doe [email protected] work:[email protected] 555-555-1212
work:555-555-1212 cell:555-555-1212 123 Main St., AnyTown, Ontario just east of
the quarry used to be friends with Tom, Dick, and Harriett OLDwork:555-555-1212
OLD:122 Main St. NoWhere, Ontario
Before I had a cell phone (i.e. before last Friday), I would just grep the
latter file to find a phone number when I needed it. The email addresses get
stale, because I only update the mutt file, not the grep file. The lines have
almost no order (the name come first), and no formatting other than the
occasional prefix "cell:", "work:", etc.
At the tender age of 71 I just got my first cell phone last Friday. (I was
given an iPhone 11 (circa 2019) and I have a $22/month plan from fizz.ca.) I
need to have a list of contacts on the phone, and grep doesn't work there, and
I really need to do a better job of this.
Just to get the phone started, I wrote a Perl script to read the grep file and
pull out things that look like names, email, and phone numbers and turn those
lines into VCARDs, dumping whatever wasn't name, email, and phone into the
"Notes" section. I have about 550 entries. I upload the 550-entry VCARD file
to iCloud and iCloud sends it to my iPhone.
But the emails are often wrong, because the real emails are in the mutt aliases
file, not the stale grep file. I could read the mutt aliases file, try to
match the names, and get the updated email, but I really should not have the
same information in two places. I want one, central place for contact info.
So I want to put all my contacts into one place and generate the mutt aliases
file and the VCARDs file from the one place. What, on Linux, is that one place?
I prefer CLI-friendly solutions so that I can script things. Having a GUI for
updates is okay, I guess, as long as I can still make an update using the CLI.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=linux+contact+manager
--
| Ian! D. Allen, BA-Psych, MMath-CompSci [email protected] Ottawa CANADA
| Home: www.idallen.com Contact Improvisation Dance: www.contactimprov.ca
| Former college professor of Free/Libre GNU+Linux @ teaching.idallen.com
| Improve democracy www.fairvote.ca and defend digital freedom www.eff.org
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