Re: Is default email address in notmuch setup / lib useful?

[Tomi Ollila <tomi.ollila@iki.fi>]

On Mon, Sep 06 2021, Alexander Adolf wrote:

> David Bremner <david@tethera.net> writes:
>
>> Currently notmuch tries to make a guess for a default email address
>> based on the "fully qualified hostname" of the host it is running
>> on. This is roughly equivalent to running "hostname -f". I have observed
>> two things
>> [...]
>> If people agree it's generally not useful, I'd propose to replace it
>> with some simpler default like "localhost" [1], equally useful to for
>> testing, but simpler to implement and test.
>> [...]
>
> I'd support David's suggestion to just default it to "localhost".
>
> If an unsuspecting user tries to send their first email with notmuch,
> the current behaviour could reveal information about the user's local
> infrastructure in the message. "localhost" is a much safer default, IMO.

Agreed. I tried to look whether we could get rid of user.name and
user.primary_email config values (and then emacs/other email clients
would need to resolve that information elsewhere). I don't know if
that can ever be done (or should), but the the current beaviour
is flaky (and I agree potentially insecure).


>
>   --alex

Tomi