Quoting Sepp Tannhuber (2012-09-11 17:59:12)
> Hi Patrick,
> 
> thank you for answering and for this really good mail client!
pleasure :)

> > One reason I have not bothered to implement this so far is that in the long run,
> > I want to have urwid Tree widgets as top level widgets in thread buffers.
> > This would also allow "move to next sibling/parent" and so on.
> I did not know that it would be so complicated. But nice to hear that development
> is going on.
Yea, trees in urwid are a bit messed up atm. alot's thread buffer uses its own
archaic widget layout, which is eventually to be replaced.

> > So you can of course use this method to set an "Attach" header, but as of now
> > alot will not interpret and remove this when reading the edited text.
> Exactly!

I think this will not so hard to do. Could you open up a feature request issue
on github for this?

> > When you see the "to>" prompt, type in some prefix of a (realname part of a)
> > contact from abook and hit <tab>.
> This was my assumption. But it is not working here. Obviously I make a mistake. Here is my
> config:
> -- BEGIN ~/.config/alot/config --
> theme = solarized_dark
> editor_cmd = 'vim +/^$ "+normal j" "+:set textwidth=80" "+:set ft=mail"'
> 
> [accounts]
> 
>     [[work]]
>         realname = Joseph Tannhuber
>         address = jtannhuber@work.de
>         signature = ~/.signature
>         sendmail_command = msmtp --account=work -t
>         sent_box = maildir:///home/sepp/Maildir/Sent
>         draft_box = maildir:///home/sepp/Maildir/Drafts
>         [[[abook]]]
>             type = abook
> -- END --
> Is there anything missing?

No, that's what I use as well.
Note that this variant assumes your contact file is ~/.abook/addressbook. I'm not aware of format
issues for different abook versions so far. Also note that this will complete case-sensitive
strings of the format "Firstname Lastname <address>".

To debug this you can replay this introspect session and see how far you get.
Start alots python shell (pyshell command), then:

        >>> from alot.settings import settings
        >>> settings.get_addressbooks()
        [<alot.addressbooks.MatchSdtoutAddressbook object at 0x2890a10>, <alot.addressbooks.AbookAddressBook object at 0x2776650>]
        >>> settings.get_addressbooks()[0]
        <alot.addressbooks.MatchSdtoutAddressbook object at 0x2890a10>
        >>> A=settings.get_addressbooks()[0]
        >>> A.get_contacts()
        [... CONTACT TUPLES HERE...]

Hope this helps. Otherwise don't hesitate to open a bug report on github.

> By the way: Is it possible to set the X11 urgency hint flag when new mail arrives? In principle
> one can use the visual bell in the terminal. Then alot must only invoke a shell command:
>   echo -e "\b"

Well, alot does not pull your mails itself, so has no means of knowing when new mail arrives.
I personally use a mail indicator widget I wrote for my window manager that periodically
checks the notmuch index for new mail: http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Notmuch_mail_integration

Alot can of course fire shell commands. What it is lacking at the moment is the ability to periodically
fire custom (alot-)commands. This feature would not be hard to implement, but so far I did not bother
to do so as I considered mail-fetching not part of alots responsibility.
But you're not the first one to want this, so I guess it'd be worth it.

Cheers,
/p