Re: BUG: sendemail-validate hook is run too early

Jani Nikula <jani.nikula@intel.com> writes:

I will make two suggestions, so please do not react before reading both ;-)

The purpose of the validate hook, at least as it was originally designed, was to vet the log message and patch contents, so what you reported is not at all surprising. After all, the sub that uses the hook is called "validate_patch" ;-).

A low-hanging documentation fix (this is one suggestion) is to phrase "e-mail to be sent" as "e-mail that has been submitted (to git-send-email)" to avoid the confusion.

You do not want to use the sendemail-validate hook for checking for the recipients, because the e-mail message is not a good source of that information.

When a recipient is added, two things happen:

 * The recipient is added to the (internal) list of recipients on
   the underlying sendmail command line arguments.  This is the list
   of addresses that actually matter where the piece of email goes.

 * The recipient is added to the text of the message being sent, if
   s/he is being added to either To: or Cc: (this is purely for
   human consumption and does not affect where the piece of email
   goes).  A blind-carbon-copy recipient would not be added for
   obvious reasons.

If you truly want to validate where the message goes, you'd need to vet the former list, not the latter one. Otherwise, you'll miss BCC recipients.

So the other suggestion is to have a separate hook to validate the list of recipients. This might be a bit more involved if we want to execute cleanly, but should not be rocket science.

The send_message() sub prepares @recipients list to form quite a bit of processing at the beginning, and the uses the resulting list to drive the sendmail by adding it to @sendmail_parameters(). The contents of this @recipients list is what you want to vet before the code talks to the sendmail program or daemon later in the function.