Bug mails should explain why the person is getting emailed.

Bug #3797 reported by Jorge Bernal
38
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Launchpad itself
Fix Released
High
Christian Reis

Bug Description

I often receive bug mails (I guess they are for motu or gnome), but they have my address as recipient, instead of a team name. So most of the times I don't know why I'm receiving that mail.

The equivalent for specification tracking is bug 39420.

Revision history for this message
Brad Bollenbach (bradb) wrote :

We need to strike a balance here between an informative, useful piece of mail, and one that isn't littered with too much information that would clutter up the messages of people who reply by email. Repeating product or package names in the bugmail notifications has the risk of such cluttering, I think.

But, I've started to make some headway on making bugmail more useful.

One is that I've added a footer. Here's an example:

To: <email address hidden>
From: Foo Bar <email address hidden>
Subject: [Bug 9] Firefox crashes all the time
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 20:01:27 -0000

Public bug report changed:
http://192.168.1.2:8086/malone/bugs/9

Comment:
Yes, I agree, firefox does crash a lot.

--
You are receiving this message because you are on the Cc list of this bug,
or are a member of a team that is, or you are assigned to fix it.

Another thing that I think might help is if, via the web UI, you could reply to an individual message like in Bugzilla. That, in combination with the subject of the message, would, IMHO, help give a lot of useful context without cluttering up the message.

(I believe the reason we don't already allow replying to individual comments in the web UI might be to not encourage too much discussion on a bug, due to the risk of flame wars, etc. In practice though, not being able to reply to an individual comment is just a pain in the ass, IMHO. :)

What do you think about these suggestions Jorge?

Brad Bollenbach (bradb)
Changed in malone:
status: New → NeedInfo
Revision history for this message
Jorge Bernal (koke) wrote :

The footer is nice, but doesn't solve this problem. I know I receive the mail because one of that reasons, I just want to know which one :)

Anyway, the problem is I can't split bugs into different folders, albeit I can recognise the product once I open the mail looking at the URL.The simple solution for me would be to be able to filter motu bugs, desktop bugs and personal, currently I'm filtering all of them by:

* ^Reply-To:.*bugs.launchpad.net>

Maybe some X-Malone-BugFor header or something similar could work for filtering

Revision history for this message
Björn Tillenius (bjornt) wrote : Re: [Bug 3797] Bug mails should be more descriptive

On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 10:48:16AM -0000, Jorge Bernal wrote:
> Anyway, the problem is I can't split bugs into different folders, albeit
> I can recognise the product once I open the mail looking at the URL.The
> simple solution for me would be to be able to filter motu bugs, desktop
> bugs and personal, currently I'm filtering all of them by:
>
> * ^Reply-To:.*bugs.launchpad.net>
>
> Maybe some X-Malone-BugFor header or something similar could work for
> filtering

If you look at this mail, you'll see that it includes a X-Launchpad-Bug
header (it was added not long ago). See
https://wiki.launchpad.canonical.com/InitialBugContacts for more
information about it.

Revision history for this message
Christian Reis (kiko) wrote : Re: Bug mails should be more descriptive

Yes, hopefully the presence of an X-Launchpad-Bug header is enough to know that this email comes from Malone. I don't like the idea of a footer at all, for various reasons, and a multi-line footer containing the word "or", well, I like that even less.

Revision history for this message
Brad Bollenbach (bradb) wrote : Re: [Bug 3797] Bug mails should be more descriptive

Le 29-Nov-05 à 10:18 AM, Christian Reis a écrit :

> Public bug report changed:
> https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/3797
>
> Comment:
> Yes, hopefully the presence of an X-Launchpad-Bug header is enough to
> know that this email comes from Malone. I don't like the idea of a
> footer at all, for various reasons, and a multi-line footer containing
> the word "or", well, I like that even less.

As a more-than-short-term solution, I don't like a footer that uses
"or" either, but that 15 minutes of work for the $0.05 solution
helped to address the problem for those people who have *no idea* why
they are getting bugmail from Malone (including that, yes, they don't
even realize that they could in any way be part of a Cc list related
to this bug; this is one of the side-effects of having imported data
from other places and I think you heard some of those DD complaints
at UBZ. :)

The 8-16 hours of work solution, a footer that describes *exactly*
why you received this message possibly fitting in a link to, e.g. a
Malone FAQ, could, IMHO be a useful part of bugmail in the long term.

Cheers,

--
Brad Bollenbach

Christian Reis (kiko)
description: updated
Changed in malone:
status: Needs Info → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Simon Law (sfllaw) wrote :

A simpler solution would be to use the descriptive name in the To:
header.

Instead of saying:
To: <email address hidden>

you could have it e-mail me at
To: Ubuntu Bugs <email address hidden>

or if I'm specifically subscribed:
To: Simon Law <email address hidden>

That way, I know if I'm getting it because of a team affiliation, or because
I've subscribed on purpose.

Revision history for this message
Matthias Urlichs (smurf) wrote :

I second the dislike about a footer. It's impossible to automatically parse.

On the other hand, I also dislike fiddling with the To: header.

There already is a perfectly readable X-Launchpad-Bug: header, except that it doesn't say why the email was sent. Please add that information -- and not only "a" team affiliation, but "what team". Specificity is good.

Revision history for this message
Björn Tillenius (bjornt) wrote :

I think Simon's suggestion is good, using the To field makes it possible to easily see why you get an e-mail, and it doesn't pollute the body with extra information.

To make it easier to filter mail, we could also add a header as well. For example X-Launchpad-Sent-To, which would include the short (unique) name of the Person/Team the e-mail was sent to.

Changed in malone:
assignee: nobody → bjornt
importance: Medium → High
Revision history for this message
Christian Reis (kiko) wrote :

Bumping down temporarily, but please let me know if this is still bothering you a lot.

Changed in malone:
importance: High → Medium
Revision history for this message
Björn Tillenius (bjornt) wrote : Re: [Bug 3797] Re: Bug mails should explain why the person is getting emailed.

On Wed, Nov 08, 2006 at 01:36:24PM -0000, Christian Reis wrote:
> Bumping down temporarily, but please let me know if this is still
> bothering you a lot.

I bumped it up since this issue was brought up at UDS. It's a quite
simple fix, and it makes filtering e-mail a lot easier, helping people
to treat e-mails sent to them directly with higher priority.

Revision history for this message
Christian Reis (kiko) wrote :

Okay. I just wanted to point out that this is very similar to blueprint bug 39420, so keep that in mind when implementing this (perhaps a pattern or API that can be reused).

Changed in malone:
importance: Medium → High
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

I think a footer is compulsory, at least as long as we let people subscribe other people. A custom header will be fine for filtering, but not for explaining. And a munged To: header cannot obviously distinguish between direct subscription, package/product subscription, bug contact, security contact, team membership, upstream forwarding, and other subscription types we might introduce later (such as Bugzilla-style watches).

It needn't be particularly complicated:
--
https://launchpad.net/bugs/123456789
You are subscribed to bugs affecting some-package.
To unsubscribe, https://launchpad.net/distros/fooix/+source/somepackage/+subscribe

Christian Reis (kiko)
Changed in malone:
assignee: bjornt → kiko
status: Confirmed → In Progress
Revision history for this message
Christian Reis (kiko) wrote :

Making good progress, almost finished sorting out test failures. What my change does is:

  - Adds a footer explaining exactly why the person is subscribed (via all the myriad ways he can be)
  - Adds a X-Launchpad-Message-Reason header with the same information in a more filter-friendly manner.

Enjoy!

Revision history for this message
Christian Reis (kiko) wrote :

Landed in RF 3982.

Changed in malone:
status: In Progress → Fix Committed
Christian Reis (kiko)
Changed in malone:
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
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