153051 - [e-mail]-replies should give explanation

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

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

Description

[Arthur]

Newcomers often try to reply to bug-mail. But mail to
[e-mail] gets bounced without an explanation, resulting in a
huge amount of mails sent to the personal addresses of people who triage bugs.
Couldn't the auto-replier send something like:

"I'm sorry, you can't comment on bugs via email. Please go to
the URL given in the bugzilla-mail you've received to comment.
Bugzilla mails are only meant to inform you about the current
state of the bug. To change he way bugzilla sends you mail,
please go to 

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email

Thank you for testing mozilla."
Bug 56319 is similar but more targeted at the possibility to
actually reply to bugmail.

Comment 1

[gabriel]

I wonder if 'http address' would be better than 'URL' ? If they are mailing
bugzilla, maybe they won't all know what an URL is.

Comment 2

[Arthur]

http doesn't sound very newbie-friendly either. Web address would probably be
easier to understand.

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

It doesn't even bounce at the moment... it just disappears.

CCing justdave (again).

Gerv

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Bug 148554 is related.

Gerv

Comment 5

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

We had to allow delivery of mail to stop our mail being blocked for several
people.  Many ISPs are doing sender-callback-verification now, and if we don't
accept mail for [e-mail], they won't accept mail with it on
the From: line.

That said, 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.  (which is bug 148554)

Comment 6

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

*** Bug 236087 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[alanjstr]

FROM:  [e-mail]

Comment 8

[Jesse Ruderman]

Several replies to questions about security bugs have been lost because they
were sent to [e-mail] instead of being sent to the commenter
or posted in the bug.  This hurts Firefox's security because it slows down our
response and makes it look like we ignore security bug reports.

Comment 9

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Several replies to questions about security bugs have been lost because they
> were sent to [e-mail] instead of being sent to the commenter
> or posted in the bug.  This hurts Firefox's security because it slows down our
> response and makes it look like we ignore security bug reports.

I've added "do not reply" text to the top of the bugmail per bug 148554.

I've also created a semi-intelligent auto-reply script that'll discard anything
without a bug number in the subject, and send the following reply to anything
that does have a bug number in the subject:

==============
I'm sorry, but for identification reasons (email is easy to
forge) you can't comment on bugs via email.  In order to add
a comment to this bug, please visit
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=$BugID
and add the comment using the form on that page.

Bugzilla mails are only meant to inform you about the current
state of the bug. To change the way Bugzilla sends you mail,
please go to 
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email

Thank you for using Mozilla's Bugzilla.

Your original email is attached.
==============

Comment 10

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

For the record (for any sysadmin having to go tweak this) it's running on
recluse in /home/bugzilla, using procmail under the 'bugzilla' user ID.