e-mail command parsing error mails are poor

[Colin Watson]

I added a comment to another bug (https://bugs.launchpad.net/malone/+bug/5395/comments/6) discussing the poor UI involved in an attempt to add a comment by e-mail that happened to contain the following text:

        status = efi_call_phys4(efi_phys.set_virtual_address_map,
                                memory_map_size, descriptor_size,
                                descriptor_version, virtual_map);

This attempt raised another UI issue. I got the following mail back from Launchpad:

"An error occurred while processing a mail you sent to Launchpad's email
interface.

Error message:

The message you sent included commands to modify the bug report,
but you didn't sign the message with your OpenPGP key.

--
For more information about using Launchpad by e-mail, see
https://help.launchpad.net/EmailInterface
or send an email to <email address hidden>"

This mail is inadequate for two reasons:

 * Given that the e-mail interface is designed with this easy-to-encounter ambiguity between commands and text, and assuming pessimistically for the moment that this isn't going to be changed, it should acknowledge that it might have got it wrong and suggest a workaround (for example I understand that it's possible to say 'done' at the start of the mail, though that's pretty ugly, or it's possible to submit the comment through the web interface instead), rather than assuming that its heuristic parsing was correct and telling me incorrectly that I should have signed my message.

 * In addition to returning this error message, Launchpad refuses to post the comment. This is a mistake. Consider the case where a bug is being CCed to upstream developers, who proceed to have a discussion about some code, pasting examples just as I did. They're probably not going to bother working around our bug tracking system misparsing their mails; if it rejects it, they'll just shrug and move on, and we'll lose out on their comments. Launchpad should accept the comments anyway in this situation, whether or not it sends an error mail to the sender.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Oh, and it doesn't tell me which lines it thought were commands - I have to guess. Most parsers do better than that when returning error messages. :-)

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

Hi, Colin.

Thanks for the bug report. We should indeed return a better error and let the comment through anyway.

I also think we should look at clearing up some of the ambiguity here and harden the interface to these kinds of errors, but I haven't thought much about it or looked at the email interface code with this in mind. I understand, too, there's some history here around the choices that were made prior to my involvement with Launchpad, so you might be right to be pessimistic about any change to the interface, just because people don't like to revisit these type of discussions. Especially with other issues pressing for attention, too.

Cheers,
deryck