my bbdb aggregations and wishes (was Re: BBDB v3 activity)

Michael Richardson <[email protected]> Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:40:41 -0400
Newsgroups	gmane.emacs.bbdb.user
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
I've been using BBDB with mh-e/nmh for a long time too.
Forgive me if I'm hijacking your thread...

The transition (10+ years ago?) to bbdb v3 was pretty rough, and it has never
been quite the same.   I think that almost all of us had to turn on auto-add
off due to spam, and also stuff like From: Fred Gilham <[email protected]>
I know that I had filters to ignore that kind of thing in the v2 days, but I
never figured out how to adapt forward to v3.

I know that there were gaps in the bbdb-v3/mh-e integration that were never
completed, and I tried to figure them out, but failed.  Ultimately, I think
that the bbdb-fu among mh-e experts is too low, and the mh-e-fu among
bbdb-experts is equally low, and my {bbdb,mh-e}-fu is relatively low.
{and I wrote two [non-emacs] LISP intepreters 40 years ago, when that was a thing}

Like, bbdb/mh-e does not consistently show me the address book entry, and I don't
know why.

In theory, hittin : is supposed to show it via (bbdb-mua-display-sender),
and it does I guess, if it's for an existing contact, but I think at some
point (with v2) that would lead to an add request, which for me, does not
happen.  One reasult is that I have 2010 era emails for many contacts, and
none for more recent ones...
In the days of auto-add and less spam, I had (still have), a thing that would
auto-add, but whenever an entry was *seen* it would increment "seencount"
The idea is that then I'd GC out all the "seencount 1" entries as more
likely spam... 15K of my 19K .bbdb entries have a seencount entry, many quite
high.   Like a former IETF Chair has a seencount of 785... I'm uncertain if
that update is still working or not.

I would still like to fix this, and I'd even put up O(500EU)/year if someone would
fix things. That's not that much.
I know that there are some tools to sync bbdb with CalDAV contacts, or maybe
non-generically with gmail contacts, but I never did get that working.

I have some well beaten, quite trivial, scripts that moves in mybox (tree)
{I have 33 subfolders of inbox, many under inbox/todo, sadly ignored} to my
laptop for when I am travelling/have poor connectivity.  That script checks
.bbdb into a git-tree, git push/pulls to/from laptop, and this mostly works
great, letting git deal with patching.
When I'm just down the street at the diner, I just ssh/mosh, emacsclient in
the terminal, and use the same emacs process on my desktop.
Where I wind up with pain is when I use that mosh to deal with something
that's not on my laptop (some archived email), and I decide I should update
the bbdb too, and then there is a git conflict.
So the sync to CalDAV (preferrably, one I operate, but
fastmail/gmail/protonmail sync would also have value) would perhaps more
sensibly deal with multiple updates.
Failing that, my guess is that a bbdb specific merge program could be a win
for some.

Other things I'd like with my pony:
1. ability to request other people's OpenPGP or S/MIME keys, and then store
   them in, or connected to my bbdb entry.

2. some way to annotate both incoming (archived to other mailboxes) and
   outgoing emails (in my outbox) with the bbdb unique UUID...

--
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