I hacked together the attached elisp yesterday.  It provides bindings to
put sender or recipients into bbdb.  (Recipients part needs more
testing.)  It also colors the from line green if the sender is in bbdb,
or orange otherwise.  When it's been through a bit more testing, I'll
submit at least the first part as a patch.

I prefer not to autocapture everything into bbdb, and for the same
reason, I don't want to use notmuch itself as my contacts DB.  Mostly,
this is because I read lots of email on lists, sent by people I'm
unlikely to write back to.  I don't like every John I've heard from
coming up on autocomplete.  Other reasons include sync to phone and
adding contact information from channels other than email.

bergey

Jameson Graef Rollins <jrollins@finestructure.net> writes:

> On Tue, Jul 10 2012, Daniel Bergey <bergey@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>> As far as I can tell, notmuch doesn't integrate as smoothly with bbdb as older
>> emacs mailclients.  I'm especially looking for a snarf function that
>> distinguishes sender from recipient.
>>
>> How do other people use bbdb with notmuch?
>>
>> Does anyone have lisp code like that which ships with bbdb for other
>> clients?
>>
>> If I were to find time to write such code, what would you like it to do?
>
> Hey, Bergey.  This is something that I think needs improvement as well.
> I've been just manually constructing the bbdb entries myself.
>
> But what I've really been meaning to get going is address
> auto-completion from the database, which I'm pretty sure could obviate
> my need for bbdb altogether:
>
> http://notmuchmail.org/emacstips/#index13h2
>
> Getting it working seems more difficult than it should be, though, and
> the existing solutions seem a bit slower than they need to be [0].  So I
> think there's also room for improvement here.
>
> For instance, I think it would be rad if notmuch provided this
> functionality natively, in the CLI, or even in the library [1].  I think
> it's definitely doable, and it would be a nice little project.
>
> The emacs integration could be a bit smoother as well.  A single config
> option should either turn the functionality on or off.  That would be
> very convenient [2].
>
> jamie.
>
> [0] id:"87r4xur3rv.fsf@plc.plecavalier.com"
> [1] For what it's worth, I would prefer a solution that didn't involve
>     any caching of addresses outside of the database.
> [2] I also find it changes the behavior of the ido tab completion
>     interface that I'm used to using in message mode.