I’ve recently been moving from the slow, bulky AJAX of the Gmail interface to the nice, lean, familiar keybinding of mutt.  Below is a simple ruby script I wrote to convert the Gmail CSV of your contacts to useful mutt aluases:

#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'iconv'

names = []

Iconv.iconv(‘UTF32//IGNORE’,’UTF-8′,File.open(ARGV[0]).read)[0].gsub(/\000/,”).sub(/^../,”).each(“\n”) do |line|
f = line.chomp.split(/”?,”?/)
f[1] = f[1].split(‘@’)[0].sub(‘%’,’@’) if f[1] =~ /%/
f[0] = f[1] if f[0].to_s == “”
next if f[0] == ‘Name’
puts “alias \”#{f[1]}\” \”#{f[0]}\” <#{f[1]}>”
next unless names.index(f[0]).nil?
puts “alias \”#{f[0].gsub(‘ ‘,”)}\” \”#{f[0]}\” <#{f[1]}>”
names << f[0]
end