56319 - Mail to [e-mail] bouncing!

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

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

Description

[Scott Gifford (old account)]

I received this bounce message at around 5:45pm EDT today (Oct. 12 2000), after
responding to a message from Bugzilla:

<[e-mail]>:
207.200.81.215 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 5.1.1 <[e-mail]>... User unknown
Giving up on 207.200.81.215.

I've verified that's what's going on:

[sgifford@sghome sgifford]$ nslookup -q=mx mozilla.org
Server:  dekutree.home
Address:  10.0.0.100

mozilla.org
preference = 10, mail exchanger = gila.mozilla.org
mozilla.org
nameserver = ns.meer.net
mozilla.org
nameserver = ns2.meer.net
gila.mozilla.org
internet address = 207.200.81.215
ns.meer.net
internet address = 140.174.164.2
ns2.meer.net
internet address = 216.206.136.2

[sgifford@sghome sgifford]$ telnet 207.200.81.215 25
Trying 207.200.81.215...
Connected to 207.200.81.215.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 gila.mozilla.org ESMTP Howdy! You got mail? Sendmail 8.10.0/8.10.0
EHLO there
250-gila.mozilla.org Hello port16116.tnt1fnt.tir.com [216.40.161.16], pleased to
meet you
250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
250-8BITMIME
250-SIZE
250-DSN
250-ONEX
250-ETRN
250-XUSR
250 HELP
Mail from:<[e-mail]>
250 2.1.0 <[e-mail]>... Sender ok
rcpt to:<[e-mail]>
550 5.1.1 <[e-mail]>... User unknown
quit
221 2.0.0 gila.mozilla.org closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.

Comment 1

[Risto Kotalampi]

Why should this work?

Comment 2

[Scott Gifford (old account)]

The messages I got tracking a bug I reported had [e-mail] as
their From: header.

If it's not supposed to work, then the messages from Bugzilla should have a note
at the top saying not to respond to them, and/or a Reply-To: header to a working
address.

In general, I think that sending mail with a From: address that is known not to
work and not obviously so (with a name like "dont-respond") without overriding
it with a Reply-To header is a bad idea; very confusing for users.

Other bug tracking systems I've used automatically appended email to the bug it
was related to, and I assumed Bugzilla would do the same, since there was
nothing saying that it wouldn't.

Comment 3

[Risto Kotalampi]

This address have never worked on... I consider it a problem in bugzilla who is
sending emails with address that has never been valid. Moving to
Webtools/Bugzilla queue.

Comment 4

[Risto Kotalampi]

Moving to dawn's queue.

Comment 5

[Risto Kotalampi]

Second try.

Comment 6

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Bugzilla itself can do that.

Mozilla.org has that feature disabled.

The reasoning for this has been discussed at length in bug 44393.

Comment 7

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

FYI, Not sure if you've noticed, but "MAILER-DAEMON" doesn't work on most ISPs, 
also (that's where your bounce notices usually come from).  In general, if an 
email address ends in "-daemon" it's not meant to be replied to.

Comment 8

[Scott Gifford (old account)]

Could I suggest, then, that the reply address be something like "Buzilla (don't
reply)", prepend the message with something like *** DO NOT RESPOND - visit
bugzilla***, or something else that would make it obvious that it shouldn't be
replied to; the first time I encountered this bug, I composed 3 or 4 emails to
deal with different bugs, and was irritated when they all unexpectedly bounced,
and I had to go in and pull my comments out of the bounced messages and paste
them into Bugzilla.

Unimportantly, I disagree with your statement that "mailer-daemon" usually goes
into the bit-bucket.  Default sendmail installations generally alias
mailer-daemon to postmaster, which is required to be a mailbox that is read by a
human.

I do agree, though, that it generally is ignored.  :-)

Comment 9

[paradive]

Attachment: a work-around that makes the reporter of the bug to be the person in the From: field

Comment 10

[Scott Gifford (old account)]

Looking at the patch, $::bug{'reporter'} should probably be checked for illegal
characters.  For example, if I got the reporter set to

	'; cat /etc/passwd

it looks like the code here would happily spit out the passwd file.

I think that an easier and better solution would be to just put an autoresponder
at [e-mail], which would just send a short help message back,
and to put a note at the top of bug-related email sent out, saying not to reply
to this message.

Just as a starting point, something like this at the top of the message:

---8<---8<---8<---8<---
PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE.

The Bugzilla system is entirely Web-based.  All updates and changes to
this bug must be made via the Web.  A URL that will take you directly
to this bug is included below.
--->8--->8--->8--->8---

And something like this in the autoresponder:

---8<---8<---8<---8<---
Hello,

You have sent an email to [e-mail].  This address
is used for sending out information about bugs in the Bugzilla bug
tracking system, but is not meant to be replied to.

All updates and changes to this bug must be made via the Web.

Please visit

       http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

for more information about Mozilla's bug tracking system, or to search
for and make changes to a bug.
--->8--->8--->8--->8---

You could use the simple Berkeley autoresponder program 'vacation', included
standard with most Unix systems, as it can keep track of who has already been
sent mail, and avoid mailbombing somebody, either because they replied many
times before checking their mail, or because somebody has forged their From:
address to try and cause them to be mailbombed.

Just a suggestion,

----ScottG.

Comment 11

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

As noted in above comments, Bugzilla itself has the capability to receive email 

but b.m.o has it disabled.  This is a mozilla.org issue, and not one with 

Bugzilla.  Moving to mozilla.org (which is still endico, so I don't need to 

reassign it)

Comment 12

[Andreas Franke (gone)]

-> mozilla.org's Bugzilla component.

Comment 13

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

*** Bug 124938 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 14

[alanjstr]

I'd prefer "To post to this bug, click the link below"

Comment 15

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Mail to this address no longer bounces.  Unfortunately it now basically goes
into a mailbox that nobody reads.  See bug 236087 and bug 153051.