I'm still thinking this through. It's going to fix a part of the data model
that I've never really liked. The email addresses in vCards were originally
used in the BBS days to store an email address where a user could be contacted.
Later on we overloaded it to store the user's email address on the system.
The data flow went something like this:
+--------+ +--------------+ +--------------+
| User's | | Global | | GAB on other |
| vCard |--------->| Address Book |<---------->| Citadels |
+--------+ +--------------+ +--------------+
|
v
+---------------+
| CDB_DIRECTORY |
| table |
+---------------+
This is ugly. It's almost as
ugly as my ASCII Art probably looks in a fixed width font. :)
Anyway, the idea was that the user's email address was stored in the vCard
(with the system performing some checks and rejecting the entire vCard if
the email address was already in use or otherwise not allowed), and the vCard
was then published to the GAB, which was shared with other Citadels, and then
all email addresses from the *local* domain(s) were extracted and stored in
CDB_DIRECTORY table, which is what's used to translate Internet email addresses
to Citadel addresses.
