[#85] Adding information to trackers by email should work

Date:
2006-04-12 08:00
Priority:
3
State:
Closed
Submitted by:
Sascha Wilde (wilde)
Assigned to:
Sascha Wilde (wilde)
Summary:
Adding information to trackers by email should work

Detailed description
Mails from the trackers on wald state:

> You can respond by visiting:
> http://wald.intevation.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=###&aid=##&group_id=##
> Or by replying to this e-mail entering your response between the following markers:
> #+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+

but mail reply doesn't work:

Final-Recipient: rfc822; TRACKERNAME@wald.intevation.org
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; host wald.intevation.org[192.168.12.2] said: 550
<TRACKERNAME@wald.intevation.org>: Recipient address rejected: User
unknown in local recipient table
Message  ↓
Date: 2010-01-05 11:28
Sender: Bernhard Reiter

Maybe we should open a wish for this.
I still believe this is a significant feature for the future and I do not believe that Debian will have anything against adding an optional feature which is disabled by default.

Date: 2010-01-05 10:58
Sender: Sascha Wilde

Closed for following reasons:

1. The original problem "Mail replies to tracker" will
not be fixed by (Debian) upstream, see Debian-Bug
#438494.

2. The GRASS project does no longer use the tracker on
wald, so the project specific requests are deprecated.

3. All tracker mails are subject to regular anti spam
filtering on mail.intevation.de -- this includes an
bayesian filter, the only strategy implemented by
bogofilter.

Date: 2007-08-22 13:56
Sender: Bernhard Reiter

Markus:

The spam problem is related to the entries in the tracker
so a Mailman filtering would not help. We do quite a
bit of filtering already, I wonder if we could get better
results with bogofilter, but I doubt it.

Sascha:
We should enable this for grass manually as an experiment
and see if this helps their workflow.

Date: 2007-08-21 05:27
Sender: Markus Neteler

From the Debian report 438494 I understand that Mailman is used somewhere inside Wald. I protect GRASs mailing lists like this:

Protecting Mailman with bogofilter against spam
http://mpa.itc.it/markus/bogofilter/index.html

Date: 2007-08-21 05:24
Sender: Markus Neteler

The problem remains that bug reports on Wald remain outdated if discussion continues on the list and follow-ups aren't manually copied here.

Despite the fact that good spam filtering is possible for automated processing (incl a check if grass-dev is in cc), it would be already easier if the GRASS bug tracker maintainer just has to approve follow-ups (instead of copying them over manually). IMHO, in a volunteer organization, as much as possible needs to be automated.

Date: 2007-08-17 12:37
Sender: Sascha Wilde

As this issue is important in general anyway, I reported it upstream to the Debian Maintainer.

Its Debian-Bug #438494:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=438494

Date: 2007-08-17 12:34
Sender: Sascha Wilde

Is this issue still important for the GRASS project, now that
Issue #286:
GRASS issuetracker: reply-to address modification request
is resolved?

In any case, I don't see how both features could probably work on the same time.

Date: 2007-07-19 08:29
Sender: Bernhard Reiter

We should try to see what this does to GRASS
and we could enable the email targets manually
for this experiment.

Date: 2007-05-18 07:41
Sender: Sascha Wilde

| d) cronjobs/tracker_gateway.php could be the place where
| emails would enter the system. Next point of examination.

I doubt the mails would go that far: the needed recipient addresses aren't known to postfix (see the initial description in this issue!).

The problem is that the database schema used to generate the email addresses known to the gforge system (via views) are broken/incomplete, in fact even mailman administrative mails only work because I heavily enhanced the database.

I'll check the latest stable packages if these problems were fixed and if so, how to port the necessary changes to wald (for obvious reasons the database schemes aren't automatically upgraded on regular updates).

Date: 2007-05-17 17:06
Sender: Bernhard Reiter

Chatting with Roland Mas and examining the sources
of gforge-4.5.16 I found out:

a) The feature is disabled in the Debian packages,
see debian/patches/disable-tracker-reply-by-email.dpatch
b) Roland did not enable it because of spam and security
reasons.
c) Poking around in the source, there is
common/tracker/Artifact.class where some of the email
handling is taking place.
d) cronjobs/tracker_gateway.php could be the place where
emails would enter the system. Next point of examination.

Date: 2007-05-17 17:03
Sender: Bernhard Reiter

Inquireing a bit:

On wald /etc/postfix/main.cf does not contain
a lookup that would return an address like
grass-codeR@wald.intevation.de or
gpg4win-bugs@wald.intevation.de.

So the questions is: Where is this information?
The tables mta_lists and mta_users in the database do
not contain this information.
I will try to crosscheck with other gforge variants.

Date: 2007-05-17 15:32
Sender: Bernhard Reiter

As Markus pointed out, this is a feature that _should_ work with gforge, so the problem will be within our setup or the Debian packages.

Date: 2007-05-17 11:07
Sender: Bernhard Reiter

* I am raising priority and focussing the subject.
* This has a relation to http://wald.intevation.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=286&group_id=1&atid=162
* Sascha's report #2338 was closed without a reason given.
* Adding a tracker software that can deal with email commands is a possible solution, there is already a wish
for roundup http://gforge.org/tracker/?group_id=1&atid=119&func=detail&aid=931

GRASS has a workflow that used this way of adding information to the tracker. Markus: I think we might consider suggesting an improved workflow for grass-dev@.
The reason is that open email interface will be more and more targetted by spammers for which there is not complete defense. So most modern trackers will only allow registered users to update the information. If the users are registered already, I suggest we send the original email to the list and then everybody interested and start monitoring the ticket and discussion then should happen via the webinterface. I know this is not ideal.

Doing a roundup plugin is something that we might actually tackle at some point now that we get to use wald more and more. You can help of course.

Date: 2007-04-07 15:53
Sender: Markus Neteler

For the GRASS project it is rather important to have this working. Thanks,

Markus

Date: 2006-11-17 16:08
Sender: Sascha Wilde

With the recent upgrade the possibility of answering via mails
is no longer advertised in the mails generated by trackers.
So the problem is not really solved but no more critical as the
missing feature is no longer promoted... :-/

Date: 2006-04-25 15:32
Sender: Bernhard Reiter

Thanks for doing the report to Gforge,
here is the direct URL.
http://gforge.org/tracker/?group_id=1&atid=105&func=detail&aid=2338

Date: 2006-04-24 09:43
Sender: Sascha Wilde

I reported the problem on the GForge.org bugtracker.
I'ts #2338 there.

No attached documents

Field Old Value Date By
priority42010-01-05 11:28Bernhard Reiter
close_date2010-01-05 11:282010-01-05 11:28Bernhard Reiter
status_idOpen2010-01-05 10:58Sascha Wilde
close_date2010-01-05 10:582010-01-05 10:58Sascha Wilde
summaryAdding information to trackers by email should work for GRASS2007-08-17 12:37Sascha Wilde
priority32007-07-19 08:29Bernhard Reiter
summaryAdding information to trackers by email should work.2007-07-19 08:29Bernhard Reiter
priority22007-05-17 11:07Bernhard Reiter
priority12007-05-17 11:07Bernhard Reiter
summaryMail to trackers doesn\'t work2007-05-17 11:07Bernhard Reiter
priority42006-11-17 16:08Sascha Wilde
priority32006-04-21 19:18Bernhard Reiter
assigned_tonone2006-04-21 19:18Bernhard Reiter