What is The Insidious Big Brother Database?

Taken from http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/

The Insidious Big Brother Database (BBDB) is a contact management utility created by Jamie Zawinski for use with Emacs. It is tightly integrated with several mail and news readers, allowing it to create database entries directly from mail and news messages. As is usual with applications for Emacs, this record creation can be configured in many ways, ranging from a boolean create/don't create setting to creation based on the result of a user-supplied function.

Database records can be used to store many types of information, from name and address to URLs and X-Face images. This information can be displayed when a message from an entity named in a database record is recieved. In addition, messages from database members can be tagged in the Gnus Summary Buffer, and Gnus scoring can be configured based on the contents of database records. Supercite citations can even be preset through the use of records in the BBDB.

What is BBDB::Export?

A perl module designed to make it easy to export data from bbdb to multiple formats, and a command line script (bbdb-export) for doing the conversion. Supported formats include ldif and vCard.

This project started with a script, BbdbToLdap, which I wrote to export my bbdb data to .ldif, and also to keep my .bbdb in sync with an LDAP server. I ran this script from cron so that my .bbdb was always in sync with all my tools that spoke LDAP. But then I wanted to start building vCards and my .mail_aliases file too.

There are already a number of different single-format exporters for BBDB. See this page:

• http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/BbdbExporters

I used several of these exporters for building my test cases.

There is also another perl project, AddressBook, which is dedicated to syncing data between a number of different formats including BBDB. I unfortunately didn't find this project until after I had already written BbdbToLdap. However, AddressBook's project on sourceforge doesn't exist, and the code is broken and isn't being maintained.

Features

All the dude really wanted was:

• to maintain contact information in bbdb (updates must be done in bbdb).
• to export data from bbdb to various useful formats.
• a script to run in the background (e.g. from cron) to keep contact data synchronized between applications.
• a script that could be used (or maybe even customized) by BBDB users who don't necessarily know perl.
• to make it simple to write a new perl plugin to support a new format.

Download

• http://search.cpan.org/~vvu/

Prerequisites

• BBDB
• Term::ANSIColor
• Pod::Usage
• Text::vFile::asData

-- AleX