Comment 7 for bug 654998

I think the easiest way to solve the problem is to clarify what you want to share in branch.conf with the other branch users.
Obviously you *don't* want to share the email, so don't set it there. Instead, define it in locations.conf in a section specific to your branch or at any level that allow you reuse it for several branches.

That may not be ideal but seems like the best you can achieve until we rework the internal config which is a pre-requisite to implementing tree.conf. One could argue that the local branch.conf should take precedence over the master branch.conf for the email configuration option but while you can try to write a patch for that against the current code base, I'm not sure the result will be pretty (and will be confusing for users to always remember which option is set where).