Re: add sender without mail if mail is in some ignored-list?

Greg Troxel <[email protected]> Fri, 27 Mar 2020 19:39:33 -0400
Newsgroups gmane.emacs.bbdb.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
"Roland Winkler" <[email protected]> writes:

> Where in the BBDB code should it be checked whether an email address
> should be ignored?  bbdb-annotate-message could filter such unwanted
> addresses.  Is this the right place?
>
> If gets an email from
>
>     John Doe <[email protected]>
>
> I can imagine, at least, the following scenarios for BBDB's
> auto-update machinery:
>
> (1) Ignore this message completely.
>
> (2) Create a record for John Doe if it does not yet exist,
>     but without an email address.
>
> (3) Update John Doe's existing record, but without adding the email
>     address.
>
> Case (3) is simple to handle.  I am not sure whether it may cause
> problems to distinguish case (1) and (2).  (I am the wrong person to
> answer this question because I do not use the auto-update stuff at all.)
>
> Maybe, users who need to distinguish case (1) and (2) already run
> the auto-update machinery in "query" mode.  Naturally, this can
> filter out case (1), too.

Functionally, completely ignoring name/address pairs that contain a
banned address part like [email protected] is the right thing to
do, in my view.

Case 3 isn't so bad but the whole notion that
"John Doe <[email protected]>" should be decided automatically to
match a  record based on name seems off to me.  The false positive rate
just seems too high.