The Mutt email client at work… thanks to symlink.dk

I’m still using “Mutt” as my main email client if you can believe it, and yes, I know it’s 2015. Still for me personally nothing allows me to work through my daily inbox at work (which can easily grow to 1,000 new messages a day) quicker than a keyboard-controlled, ASCII only email client like the venerable mutt (before that, I migrated from Unix’ old “mail” to “elm” in case you remember those).

No matter what tool I tried when attpempting to teach Mutt to show event invitations, parsing exchange-generated vcalendar events never worked properly for me, so I decided to come up with my own (much like every Python hacker worth his salt has to come up with an entire scratch built CMS framework at some point ;))

You can find the results below — as usual, the code is butt ugly (for some reason, my Python has started looking even worse than my Perl recently if such a thing is possible), but it does the job and works for me; YMMV.  You’ll certainly need to translate the field labels into your own language, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. You can then use mutt’s “auto_display” function to call the script automatically on text/calendar entries.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys

from datetime import *


def date_to_string(d):
 # 20151006T103000
 now=datetime.now()
 dt = datetime.strptime(d, "%Y%m%dT%H%M%S")
 return "%s (%d days)" % (dt.strftime("%A, %d. %B %Y, %H:%M Uhr"),
 abs (dt-now).days)

 

if __name__=="__main__":
 attendees=[]
 data=open(sys.argv[1]).readlines()
 for l in data:
 if l.find("ATTENDEE") > -1:
 attendees.append(l.strip().split(";")[4].replace('CN="', '').split(",")[0])
 if l.find('DTSTART;')==0:
 event_start=l.strip().split(":")[1]
 if l.find('DTEND;')==0:
 event_end=l.strip().split(":")[1]
 if l.find('SUMMARY;')==0:
 event_subject=l.strip().split(":")[1]
 if l.find('ORGANIZER;')==0:
 organizer = l.strip().split(";")[1].replace('"', '')
 orga_name, bla, orga_mail = organizer.split(":")
 orga_name=orga_name.replace('CN=', '')
 if l.find("LOCATION;")==0:
 location=l.strip().split(":")[1].replace('\\', '')

 if l.find("TZID:")==0:
 time_zone=l.strip().split(":")[1]
 
 
 print "===================================================================="
 print "Thema : ", event_subject
 print "Ersteller : ", orga_name
 print " ", orga_mail
 print "Start : ", date_to_string(event_start)
 print "Ende : ", date_to_string(event_end)
 print "Zeitzone : ", time_zone
 print "Ort : ", location
 print "Teilnehmer: ", ", ".join(attendees) 
 print "===================================================================="
 
 sys.exit(0)