1329525 - Workaround to prevent Gmail from threading types of changes

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Release Engineering Graveyard :: Applications: Balrog (backend), defect, P3)

Description

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

This might be very much in the realm of personal preference, but it irks me that gmail will group rule changes for insert/update/delete into threads for the same action. It would be more useful to show them in reverse chronological order, but it doesn't let me do that.

In the past we've set headers to start grouping mail, eg
 https://dxr.mozilla.org/build-central/source/buildbotcustom/process/release.py#1761
so this is going the opposite way. Some docs here:
 https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/guides/threads
Perhaps we can set a random string for In-Reply-To and/or References.

Standby to bikeshed, go!

Comment 1

[Jaehoon Hwang]

Hello, I want to try to do this improvement(?).
Can you talk more about this problem?

Comment 2

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

Forwarding request to Ben Hearsum.

Comment 3

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

(In reply to Jaehoon Hwang from comment #1)
> Hello, I want to try to do this improvement(?).
> Can you talk more about this problem?

The problem that Nick talks about can be seen on this mailing list: https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.com/forum/#!forum/balrog-db-changes

When we make changes to certain tables, we send e-mail that notifies that list. The problem Nick describes is that even though each mail shows changes to a different Rule, Permission, etc. - many of them get grouped together. This is annoying and somewhat confusing.

The simplest solution here is ungrouping them - and Nick has some suggestions about how to do that (changing In-Reply-To per message seems like a promising approach).

Testing this is going to be a little bit painful - we disable mail notification for local dev environments. If you set the environment variables listed on https://github.com/mozilla/balrog/blob/94857372cf47bb7ea80a442aff2ea8389a9f4a7d/docker-compose.yml#L23, and then run "docker-compose up", you should get notifications when you change Rules.

Does that make sense?

Comment 4

[Jaehoon Hwang]

Yes.
I do have one question: where can I find the file that is sending these mails? 
Is it in https://github.com/mozilla/balrog/blob/master/auslib/db.py?
I want to make sure I'm working on the right file before I start.

Comment 5

[Jaehoon Hwang]

Sorry, I don't know how to edit this message, but to be more specific:
https://github.com/mozilla/balrog/blob/master/auslib/db.py#L2377

Comment 6

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

(In reply to Jaehoon Hwang from comment #5)
> Sorry, I don't know how to edit this message, but to be more specific:
> https://github.com/mozilla/balrog/blob/master/auslib/db.py#L2377

You're on the right track. "make_change_notifier" (https://github.com/mozilla/balrog/blob/94857372cf47bb7ea80a442aff2ea8389a9f4a7d/auslib/db.py#L2406) is the code involved here. There's also some tests for them at https://github.com/mozilla/balrog/blob/94857372cf47bb7ea80a442aff2ea8389a9f4a7d/auslib/test/test_db.py#L3856.

Comment 7

[Jaehoon Hwang]

Hello, I'm trying to send myself the mail notification using gmail.

    # Grab mail information from the local environment
    - SMTP_HOST=smtp.gmail.com
    - SMTP_PORT=465
    - SMTP_USERNAME=[e-mail]
    - SMTP_PASSWORD=somepassword
    - SMTP_TLS=587
    - NOTIFY_TO_ADDR=[e-mail]
    - NOTIFY_FROM_ADDR=[e-mail]

I'm getting unexpected disconnection error.
Can you help me?

Comment 8

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

(In reply to Jaehoon Hwang from comment #7)
> Hello, I'm trying to send myself the mail notification using gmail.
> 
>     # Grab mail information from the local environment
>     - SMTP_HOST=smtp.gmail.com
>     - SMTP_PORT=465
>     - SMTP_USERNAME=[e-mail]
>     - SMTP_PASSWORD=somepassword
>     - SMTP_TLS=587
>     - NOTIFY_TO_ADDR=[e-mail]
>     - NOTIFY_FROM_ADDR=[e-mail]
> 
> I'm getting unexpected disconnection error.
> Can you help me?

This is probably due to setting SMTP_TLS. It's actually supposed to be a boolean that enables or disables TLS. IIRC, you want to disable it for smtp.gmail.com, so try not setting it at all.

Comment 9

[[github robot]]

Commit pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/balrog

https://github.com/mozilla/balrog/commit/5d2d3438f1f8c4d1f4577f4ec4158292608f534a
Bug 1329525: Ungrouping of emails (#256). r=bhearsum

Comment 10

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

Very nice work on this Jaehoon, this is now in production! Let me know if you'd like help finding another bug to work on.