excessive translation import template mails (also poor phrasing)

[Martin Pool]

Launchpad is importing translation templates from lp:bzr. Every time it does an import it sends mail to everyone in ~bzr-core:

"""
Hello bzr-core,

On 2011-09-19 12:30z (2 minutes ago), you uploaded a translation
template for bzr in Bazaar trunk in Launchpad.

The template has now been imported successfully.
"""

I don't want to get mail about this, which basically just means "the system's working." I can't do anything with it and I apparently can't silence it. There are lots of other people in the To line who probably have even less interest.

It's also poorly phrased to say "you uploaded". I didn't. Someone did.

Options:
 * just don't send mail (does anyone actually want it?) but instead, if it's useful, make the freshness visible in the web site
 * have a concept of 'people who want to get mail about template imports' and send mail to them
 * have a link to mute the mail

See also bug 531446, bug 588292, bug 616587, bug 336063.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

Aside from the other problems, Launchpad also seems to be sending mail

1- to users whose account is inactive <https://launchpad.net/~ian-clatworthy>
2- to email addresses that are obsolete, for accounts that are still active <https://launchpad.net/~henninge>

This could possibly be split to a separate bug.

Perhaps there could be some systematic guard against those things happening for all Launchpad mail sources. Obviously it is unacceptable to send mail to people who have shut down their account.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

I'm going to bump this up to critical on the grounds that continuing to send mail to people who have closed their account or removed their address is bad (possibly illegal). We could just fix that, but I hope we could just cut these mails, unless someone sees value in them.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

I think this needs to be split into two: the translation imports are not at all the same as sending mail to people without an active account; the former has no justification for being critical, the latter _may_ (but it doesn't meet any of our current guidelines).

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

I haven't seen Launchpad send mail to inactive accounts in any other
case. (It may be doing it but just without putting them in the To
line, so it's not visible.)

Repeatedly mailing people who closed their account is likely against
the law in some countries. If that's not critical it seems like a gap
in the definition.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

I agree it is important, but leave whether it is against the law or not to legal, and the relevant jurisdiction - I don't think we make any particular effort to abide by e.g. sharia law : we operate in the UK. Clearly if its against the law there rectifying any known instance it will be an *operational* issue - we wouldn't want to wait for a code change + audit etc.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

On 21 September 2011 15:25, Robert Collins <email address hidden> wrote:
> I agree it is important, but leave whether it is against the law or not
> to legal, and the relevant jurisdiction - I don't think we make any
> particular effort to abide by e.g. sharia law : we operate in the UK.

I am disappointed you would think I was aiming at such a straw man.
The UK has laws against repeatedly sending mail to people who have
indicated a wish to no longer receive it, and I think it's pretty
clear cancelling your account means you no longer want to hear from
Launchpad. There may be some loophole but that would be a sad
position for Canonical to be in.

Anyhow, we agree it's important; if anyone actually complains we can
fix it for their case.

[Данило Шеган (danilo)]

Related bugs: bug 353648, bug 418177, bug 621085, bug 616587, bug 768095 (probably a duplicate of all of the above). As you can see, plenty of issues that have still not been tackled :(

I'd say the gist of this bug is a duplicate of 353648, but it describes other problems (namely emailing people it shouldn't) that should be fixed.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

The problem comes from importFromQueue returning a tuple indicating a mail should be sent - though the interface doesn't say so, it actually can return None, None to ask for no mail. POFile already returns None on success, however POTemplate returns an expansion of poimport-template-confirmation.txt. There is also in po_import a _shouldNotify() function, but that only filters out mail to vcs-imports, and it's probably better to suppress based on it being a success, rather than depending on the target person.

The email addresses come from get_recipients and _get_recipients_for_team which does direct store access to get the transitive membership, and I think that it needs to explicitly check the account status is active.

Possible the situation with Henninge was that his canonical address was still preferred; it's not any more.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

> I think this needs to be split into two: the translation imports are not at all the same as sending mail to people without an active account;

I split out bug 858605

[Launchpad QA Bot (lpqabot)]

Fixed in stable r14034 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/14034>.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

planning to qa this by uploading a tarball, running the imports,
examining the outgoing mailbox and checking nothing was sent

also, just to check mail in general is working, commenting on a bug
and checking that mail for that was sent

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

announcement: http://blog.launchpad.net/?p=2880