Whines to Mailing Lists

[David Marshall]

On 10/1/09 2:48 PM, "Gregary Hendricks" <ghendricks at novell.com> wrote:

>>>> On 10/1/2009 at 07:36 AM, in message <4AC4B057.3060009 at bugzilla.org>, Max
> Kanat-Alexander <mkanat at bugzilla.org> wrote:
>> On 10/01/2009 05:24 AM, Ben Bell wrote:
>>> What we effectively
>>> want is to be able to send mails to external email addresses other than
>>> those belonging to individual bugzilla users.
>>  
>> Okay. So basically this is just the ability to send whines to email
>> addresses without a Bugzilla account. Depending on how invasive it is,
>> it's possible we'd be interested in having it upstream. (If it's very
>> invasive or adds too much complexity, the complexity would overwhelm the
>> benefit of including it in Bugzilla itself.)
> 
> Why not just create an account with the list email address as the email
> address? 
> We do this all the time. Fake user with foo-list at lists.mycompany.com as the
> email. Then we can assign bugs, set in CC or QA to our hearts content and
> everyone gets the bug mail.

We do much the same at Yahoo!

However, that's a little bit different from having whines for that user.
Some of our users have expressed a desire to send whines to another user
that happens to be a mailing list.  We usually demur, saying that we don't
allow users to create whines for other users.

It's really rather trivial to redirect email that you get to whomever you
like.  We advise those interested in the capability to set up whines for
themselves and filter/forward them as needed.  There's a lot of information
in the mail headers.

How would you know that the external email address really does want mail
from Bugzilla?  Doesn't this just make it really easy to turn Bugzilla into
a spam machine?

Dealing with email capabilities is so annoying that I believe Bugzilla
should be doing less with email rather than adding new email-related
capabilities.  When you can get the results of a search by RSS, doesn't that
lower the value of the whine capability?

If we absolutely must have this, perhaps it should be a list view that
corresponds to the email that whine presents, so that I can perform a search
and send off the results as I choose.

In my crontab:

*/15 * * * * curl 
http://bugzilla.foo.com/buglist.cgi?cmdtype=runnamed&namedcmd=important&ctyp
e=whine | mail my-mailing-list at foo.com