Hi,

The mail system has several flaws and nasty behaviour especially with information leak.

I describe a scenario:

Actors: Partner A -> External partner of the company, customer

User B, Manager C - > internal employees of the company.

Partner A  has a customer record in the odoo system with correct email adress.

1. Partner A sending an RFQ for Manager A and the odoo catchall interface catching that email and inserting into open chatter module. Author Partner A, recipient Manager C, subscriber Manager C.

2. Manager C forwarding this mail outside of odoo to User B and give hime instructions that he must prepare a quote.

3. Odoo's catchall interface importing this mail too, correctly recognizing that is member of mail thread which was started by Partner A. But here is a problem,

    The original mail and the forwarded mail got a new subscriber Partner A, and Partner A getting notifications about them, basically the Odoo system sending the forwarded mail to Partner A! This is the place of internal company information leak! After that time Partner A will get any information/mail (after importing them into the system with fetchmail job).

There is a boolean flag in res.partner (modified in mail addons) called 'notify_email' which controls the mails generated by notifications. Unfortunatelly it is defaults to True. But if we set this to False it wil lnot correct the problem because the partner getting subscribed to mail.thread only he don't get notifications. But this is an ann or nothing flag if we disable it then the Partner will not get any notifications, even the correct ones. 

So we need to implement a 'no_subscribe' flag and modify the mail.thread auto_subscribe and message_subscribe methods to be aware of that flag.

So we do the following:

class res_partner(orm.Model):

  """ Update partner to add a field about notification preferences, and to set none as a default of notify_email """
  name = "res.partner" 
  _inherit = ['res.partner'] 
  columns = { 
   'no_subscribe': fields.boolean('Do not add as Follower automatically') 
  } 

  _defaults = { 
   'no_subscribe': True, 
   'notify_email': lambda *args: 'none' 
  } 


class custom_mail_thread(orm.AbstractModel): 
 _inherit = "mail.thread" 

 def message_subscribe(self, cr, uid, ids, partner_ids, subtype_ids=None, context=None): 

 ids = self.pool.get('res.partner').search(cr, uid, [('no_subscribe','=',False), ('id','in', partner_ids)]) 
 _logger.info(' MAIL.THREAD SUB: Filtering out partner ids:' + str(partner_ids) + ' result_ids:' + str(ids)) 
 res = super(custom_mail_thread, self).message_subscribe(cr, uid, ids, ids, subtype_ids, context) 
 return res 

 def _message_auto_subscribe_notify(self, cr, uid, ids, partner_ids, context=None): 

 ids = self.pool.get('res.partner').search(cr, uid, [('no_subscribe','=',False), ('id','in', partner_ids)]) 
 _logger.info(' MAIL.THREAD AUTO SUB NOTIFY: Filtering out partner ids:' + str(partner_ids) + ' result_ids:' + str(ids)) 
 res = super(custom_mail_thread, self)._message_auto_subscribe_notify( cr, uid, ids, ids, context=None) 
 return res 

As You see we are logging to log file both method call, and we expect them to be called, but there is a problem. The res.partner modification was ok there is a new field and we can see it, and the new default setting for notify_email is working too.

But our two new method was never called, we try several with several mails feeded into fetchmail cron job to see if they called or not and they are not called at all and we cannot change the errorneous behaviour of the mail.thread. 

Please help us to find the correct way  ti implement this change, and please help us to understand the quirks of odoo model inheritance, because we don't see the point why it not working at all.

Thanks