For  almost  4  years,  I  used  abook[1] together with mutt[2].  This
  worked quite well. abook provided  not  only  a  database  for  e-mail
  addresses,  I  also  used  it  to implement a birthday reminder and to
  resolve phone numbers to real names.

  Now I read on the Arch Linux forums[3] about a user who replaced abook
  with  a custom script. Hmm. Why not do this as well? Indeed, abook had
  several downsides. Hence, I did the same.

  Key features of my approach:

    1.  Data is stored using JSON instead of abook's  INI  format.  This
        allows for much greater flexibility.

    2.  No  graphical  frontend  in  order  to save code. JSON is simple
        enough to write it manually.

    3.  Support for regular expressions in search queries.

    4.  Custom  search  behaviour  (obviously).  For  example,   imagine
        searching for "uninformativ.de" in abook. What you'll get is not
        only "foobarbaz@uninformativ.de" but  also  every  other  e-mail
        address  which  is  stored under my name. My script only returns
        matching addresses -- even if the person owns additional  e-mail
        addresses.

    5.  Of  course: Additional scripts implement a birthday reminder and
        phone number lookup.

  Maybe I'll push this to GitHub[4] some day.

  ____________________

  1. http://abook.sourceforge.net/

  2. http://www.mutt.org/

  3. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1088163#p1088163

  4. https://github.com/vain