This is kinda peripherally connected to mail system operations, but probably still interesting. I've opened a feedback ticket to Apple about the address collecting behavior of the MacOS Contacts application, that causes issues through interaction with their other products Mac Mail and Calendar.
Contacts automatically collects email addresses from email messages and other sources into the user's address book. It also merges these collected addresses under single entries using somewhat poorly documented heuristics which are not adjustable by the end user. This becomes a problem when Contacts changes its opinion of the "canonical" address of an user: users start receiving email messages to some secondary address that Contacts has (for somewhat unclear reasons) decided is the same as their main email address. This also becomes a plague on other Mac users when receiving email messages where this change has occurred, as their Contacts then also squirrel away the newly seen email address, possibly also changing this be the canonical address for that user. For example, the canonical address firstname.lastn...@domain.com could suddenly change into usern...@server.domain.com in users' address books, through no action of their own. This also becomes a clear bug when this kind of unexpected canonicalization change gets processed by calendar functions. Calendar server end code is not forgiving of attempts to change eg. the organizer of a meeting, and when a calendar change gets rejected by the server end, the client calendar becomes unsynchronized with the server view and any other meeting participant's view. Email address canonicalization should never be attempted on calendar entry email addresses, but the root error in this case was in the Contacts application code that caused the change. -- /* * * Otto J. Makela <o...@iki.fi> * * * * * * * * * */ /* Phone: +358 40 765 5772, ICBM: N 60 10' E 24 55' */ /* Mail: Mechelininkatu 26 B 27, FI-00100 Helsinki */ /* * * Computers Rule 01001111 01001011 * * * * * * */ _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
