The Insidious Big Brother Database (BBDB) is a contact management utility created by Jamie Zawinski for use with Emacs. For many years it was maintained by Waider. Since February 2007 BBDB is maintained by Robert Widhopf-Fenk. It is tightly integrated with several mail and news readers (see below), allowing it to create database entries directly from mail and news messages. As is usual with applications for Emacs, this record creation can be configured in many ways, ranging from a boolean create/don't create setting to creation based on the result of a user-supplied function. Database records can be used to store many types of information, from name and address to URLs and X-Face images. This information can be displayed when a message from an entity named in a database record is recieved. In addition, messages from database members can be tagged in the Gnus Summary Buffer, and Gnus scoring can be configured based on the contents of database records. Supercite citations can even be preset through the use of records in the BBDB.

BB-tools are a number of simple X-Window programs to display the status of different resources. The style and part of the code is copied from Blackbox a small and extremely fast X11-Windowmanager. Although the programs are written to be used with Blackbox, they should work in any other X11-Windowmanager.