Discussion about the insidious Big Brother DataBase

Roland Winkler | 1 Aug 2012 10:45

[BBDB] Changelog 2012-07-31

The patch below gives some minor improvements for bbdb-complete-mail.

- Cycle even if the record contains only one mail address, yet
  bbdb-dwim-mail gives us something different from what we have.
  For example, a message header "JOHN SMITH <SMITH <at> FOO.COM>" may be
  replaced by "John Smith <smith <at> foo.com>".

- Search correctly for RFC 822 addresses containing a full name.

The latter change revealed another unexpected surprise with BBDB:

Part of BBDB (yes, even v2) has allowed the possibility that a mail
address in a record is not just a plain "smith <at> foo.com". But the
record of, say, Johnathan Smith may also contain an RFC 822 address
such as "John Smith <smith <at> foo.com>". 

Jognathan Smith
       phone (home): (123) 456-7890
               mail: smith <at> example.com, John Smith <smith <at> foo.com>,
                     Joe Smith <joe <at> bar.com>

Obviously, this comes handy, if you want to use different mail
addresses in a record with different real names. But this feature
has been implemented rather incompletely. To make this work
properly, the hash table should always use canonical addresses such
as smith <at> foo.com. But currently BBDB puts "John Smith
<smith <at> foo.com>" in the hash table which makes it really impossible
to find smith <at> foo.com in this table. (A hash table does not allow to
search for a regexp.)

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headers

Stephen Leake | 1 Aug 2012 12:40

Re: [BBDB] Changelog 2012-07-31

"Roland Winkler" <winkler <at> gnu.org> writes:

> Part of BBDB (yes, even v2) has allowed the possibility that a mail
> address in a record is not just a plain "smith <at> foo.com". But the
> record of, say, Johnathan Smith may also contain an RFC 822 address
> such as "John Smith <smith <at> foo.com>". 
>
> Jognathan Smith
>        phone (home): (123) 456-7890
>                mail: smith <at> example.com, John Smith <smith <at> foo.com>,
>                      Joe Smith <joe <at> bar.com>
>
> Obviously, this comes handy, if you want to use different mail
> addresses in a record with different real names. 

With BBDB v2 I always used separate records for this case, putting
(home), (work) etc in the record name, because cycling thru the email
addresses simply did not work properly; it always used the last one.

Now that's fixed, but I suspect I'll still use separate records in a
case like this. For example, smith <at> foo.com should have a different work
phone than joe <at> bar.com. But maybe I need to experiment more.

It would be nice to not have (home) show up in the final
email address; putting a real name in the Mail field could fix that
(assuming it overrides the real name in the record).

> Would it be useful if the canonical mail address "smith <at> foo.com"
> contained in full mail address "John Smith <smith <at> foo.com>" was
> recognized properly throughout BBDB?

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Roland Winkler | 1 Aug 2012 17:39

Re: [BBDB] Changelog 2012-07-31

On Wed Aug 1 2012 Stephen Leake wrote:
> Now that's fixed, but I suspect I'll still use separate records in
> a case like this. For example, smith <at> foo.com should have a
> different work phone than joe <at> bar.com. But maybe I need to
> experiment more.

I do not quite see why an email address needs to be associated with
a phone number. For some records I do have a bunch of phone numbers
as well as a bunch of email addresses.

But I cannot think of situations where I wanted to have something
like an association list associating phone numbers with email
addresses.

> It would be nice to not have (home) show up in the final
> email address; putting a real name in the Mail field could fix that
> (assuming it overrides the real name in the record).

As my example showed, you can combine canonical mail addresses
smith <at> foo.com with real names like "John Smith <smith <at> foo.com>". 
I do not know in which context you think of "overriding" the real
name. If you send an email to smith <at> foo.com, the message header will
become

To: John Smith <smith <at> foo.com>

no matter, what the name field of the record contains.

> Perhaps a solution is to make the mail: field more structured:
>

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Roland Winkler | 24 Sep 2012 02:59

[BBDB] Changelog 2012-09-23 part 2 (with notes for BBDB lisp hackers)

On Wed Aug 1 2012 Roland Winkler wrote:
> Part of BBDB (yes, even v2) has allowed the possibility that a mail
> address in a record is not just a plain "smith <at> foo.com". But the
> record of, say, Johnathan Smith may also contain an RFC 822 address
> such as "John Smith <smith <at> foo.com>". 
> 
> Johnathan Smith
>        phone (home): (123) 456-7890
>                mail: smith <at> example.com, John Smith <smith <at> foo.com>,
>                      Joe Smith <joe <at> bar.com>

The patch below tries to make sure that mail entries containing
RFC-822 mail addresses such as "John Smith <smith <at> foo.com>" in the
example above are handled properly throughout BBDB. Essentially, it
decomposes such a mail address into a name part "John Smith" and a
stripped mail address "smith <at> foo.com". The name part is treated as
an AKA. The stripped mail address is used, for example, by BBDB's
MUA interface to identify the record for the sender or recipient of
a message.

However, if all records in your database are of the plain form
"smith <at> foo.com", the patch below should not be noticeable for you.

To make this work efficiently, BBDB caches "extra AKAs" such as
"John Smith" and the stripped addresses such as "smith <at> foo.com".
So changing the mail entry for a record requires a bit of extra care
to make sure that the cache gets updated, too. All this is similar
to various extra steps BBDB is taking to ensure the integrity of the
database. To make all this work reliable, I added the following
(taken from the updated README file):

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