RFC: Email address privacy

[Joel Peshkin]

Proposal Circulated for comments:  
(See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=145499 for details)

Sites providing support to multiple customers in competition with each 
other require the ability to prevent the customers from seeing the email 
addresses of other customers.  This applies to the display of bugs, the 
display of email addresses during processing, the contents of the email, 
and the inclusion of users as members of dropdown lists, matches of 
users by wildcard or substring.

The same feature could also be used to prevent the display of email 
addresses to non-logged-in users.

There are several possible mechanisms proposed in bug 145499.  The most 
promising of these permits a user to be placed in a special group that 
causes that user to be invisible to any user who does is not a member of 
either the same group or another group that has been granted the right 
to "see" the user's group.

For example...

fred at bugzilla.org
justdave at bugzilla.org
myk at mozilla.org
Are all members of group  "bugzillacore"

harry at tinyco.com
larry at tinyco.com
darrell at tinyco.com
Are all members of group "tinyco"

john at werty.net
al at home.com
tom at fred.net
Are all members of group "netizens"

Group tinyco and netizens are each marked as being required for mail 
visibility.
Group netizens is visible by group bugzillacore
Group tinyco is visible by group bugzillacore

As a result of this,  the bugzillacore members can see everyone
bugzillacore and tinyco members can see tinyco members
bugzillacore and netizens members can see netizens members
Any other users can see bugzillacore members and any other users not in 
tinyco or netizens.

Please provide any feedback on this concept to this list or on the bug. 
  In particular, what params should control this....

a) enable/disable the entire feature?
b) apply feature to all mention of addresses or only in choices offerred 
by matching in flags, wildcards, and dropdowns?

Thanks,

-Joel