148554 - Add "don't reply via e-mail" language to Bugzilla e-mails

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(bugzilla.mozilla.org :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Greg K.]

Please add some language to the top of Bugzilla e-mails specifying that
recipients reply by adding a comment to the bug in question rather than
attempting to reply diectly to Bugzilla or the previous respondent via return
e-mail.

This will hopefully dissuade novice users from sending unwanted e-mails to bug
triagers.

Such language might be something like this:

"ATTENTION: please do not reply to this bug via e-mail, either to Bugzilla or
the person who changed the bug. To respond, add your reply directly to the bug
in question. Thank you."

Comment 1

[Greg K.]

*** Bug 151366 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 2

[hacker formerly known as [e-mail]]

-> gerv

Comment 3

[Greg K.]

Revised text suggestion: "ATTENTION: please do not reply to this message by
e-mail. To respond, add your 'Additional Comment' directly to the bug in
question. Thank you."

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

In our experience, people get irritated very quickly with additions to bugmail
which do not add function. The whole %reasonsbody% thing was an example of this.
We thought very hard about how to minimise the impact of the "configure bugmail"
addition. 

In that light, any message which begins "ATTENTION:" is definitely not
acceptable, unless there is some method of turning it off. My alternative
strategy was to do one of two things:

1) Set the Reply-To: address on bugmails to an invalid address which mail user
agents will flag up
or
2) Have an auto-responder on the From: address which says "Post in the bug, please."

Gerv

Gerv

Comment 5

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

The latter, please. that way people who don't care don't have to see this all
the time.

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

An auto-responder has to be set up on a per-installation basis (at the moment,
at any rate) - so if you want one for b.m.o., file a bug on mozilla.org/Server Ops.

Gerv

Comment 7

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

*** Bug 231114 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

This bug was wontfixed when Mozilla was still a very developer-centric
organization.  Now that we're catering to end-users, this is worth revisiting again.

RedHat's Bugzilla bugmail has this at the top of each:

-----
Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug report.
-----

It doesn't say "ATTENTION" and it's not very big.  I think that wording would
work, here, too.

Comment 9

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

I remember how irritating %reasonsbody% was when it arrived on b.m.o. How about
a compromise - we add a section to the customisation part of the Bugzilla Guide
saying "You may want to add text to the param (hopefully soon to be template) to
tell people not to reply to emails."?

Gerv

Comment 10

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

This isn't for the Bugzilla project (anyone can already change the mail
templates and most people do).  This is for bugzilla.mozilla.org specifically.

I think there's too much whitespace at the top of the bugmails currently. 
Replace some of that whitespace with the above text, and we don't have any
vertical displacement, and we get a lot of benefit to all the new folks using
Bugzilla.

Comment 11

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

It's not about vertical displacement, though. It's about the irritation that
comes from reading text when you know exactly what it says, but can't stop
yourself reading it.

What's wrong with the autoresponder solution?

Gerv

Comment 12

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

An auto-responder seems like the right solution here.  It obtrudes only for whom
necessary, as opposed to for everyone.  We could also change "bugzilla-daemon"
to something like "post-to-bug-instead-of-replying", although that would
undoubtedly break enough mail filters that we should consider it only if an
auto-responder doesn't solve the problem effectively enough.

Comment 13

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Autoresponders are a quick way to get us blacklisted by lots of the anti-spam
blacklists.

Someone only needs to "joe job" the responder address with a spam that's sure to
get bounced by lots of site's mail filters, our autoresponder than gleefully
replies to all of the bounces (blocked spam often comes from "postmaster" or the
like rather than <> like a real bounce) and people then report our autoreply as
spam.

Comment 14

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Although I suppose we could train it to only reply to mail that has a bug number
in the subject...

Comment 15

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Bug 153051 has suggested text.

Gerv

Comment 16

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

A quick scan of the apache mailbox on mecha shows that we get on average about
10 attempts per day to reply to bugmail.  (and 1400 bounces per day, but that's
another issue)

On September 23, there were almost exactly 1400 emails delivered to
[e-mail].  1375 of those were bounce notices.  10 were spam.  15
were people attempting to reply to bugmail.

Spotchecks of those 15 emails revealed that only 2 of the 15 had discovered
their reply never made it and re-posted their reply on the bug.

3 of the ones that didn't make it to the bug were the reporter replying to
UNCONFIRMED bugs stating that the problem had been solved, and the bug could be
closed.  1 of those bugs had been resolved as a duplicate already.  The other
two were still open.

An auto-reply is not user friendly at all.  Especially if we didn't warn them in
the bugmail.

I think our best option long-term is to get the real inbound email support in
Bugzilla (Joel came up with the idea of using SRS authentication for it, so we
could verify that the message was a reply to a bugmail and to whom the message
they replied to was sent).

Short term I think we're better off adding a line to the top of the bugmail
stating that you can't reply to it.  My suggested text:

==================
Please do not reply to this email.  You can add comments at
(url goes here)
==================

That adds ONE line to the email (the URL is already there), and since it's the
very first thing in the email, I'm willing to bet most people who are used to
Bugzilla won't even notice it's there because they're used to skipping over the
URL except when they're about to click on it.  The people who've never seen
Bugzilla bugmail before will probably see it.

Comment 17

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

I dread inbound email support, because I strongly suspect we'll end up with
serious issues with comment bloat caused by lack of trimming. But that's another
issue too :-)

Let's add the line on b.m.o. and see what reaction is like.

Gerv

Comment 18

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

(In reply to comment #17)

> Let's add the line on b.m.o. and see what reaction is like.

Done.  (prompted by Jesse's comments in bug 153051)

Comment 19

[Greg K.]

Belatedly VERIFIED using TB 1.5.