[Reportbug-maint] Bug#640249: Bug#640249: reportbug ignores e-mail settings

[Kevin Locke]

On 10/31/2011 2:08 PM, Sandro Tosi wrote:
> I'm considering reverting the change you mentioned, but you have to be
> more convincing than before.

Sure, that's fair.  For clarity, I would prefer adding an additional
configuration parameter rather than requiring the envelope sender to be
either the from address or system default, because I think the submitter
of bug #614880 has a reasonable use case.  But making that change
requires supporting arguments as well, so they are provided below.

Note that in the cases below the alternative to setting an envelope
sender configuration option would be configuring reportbug to use SMTP.
 I contend that this raises the barrier to entry over using a local MTA
when one exists because the user must deal with ISP or local outgoing
port blocking, figuring out appropriate SMTP options (e.g. GMail's
non-standard configuration requirements), and configuring them for yet
another program on all systems used.  If you disagree, the scenarios
below will likely not be persuasive.

The arguments also depend on the extent to which ease/convenience is a
goal of reportbug.  Feel free to consider them with that in mind.

> On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 20:58, Kevin Locke <kevin at kevinlocke.name> wrote:
>> I contend that it is not reasonable to expect users to have local MTAs
>> configured to canonicalize/masquerade local user account names to public
>> addresses
> 
> could you please elaborate why it's not reasonable?

Sure, here are some use cases that I contend reportbug should support:
 * Reporting bugs from systems on which the reporting user does not have
administrative access to configure the MTA or the address mapping for
their user account.
 * Users who either lack the knowledge to configure their MTA, prefer
not to make changes to a working system, or prefer not to spend the time
required to determine and implement the correct configuration to satisfy
reportbug.

>> and that there are legitimate cases where users will want to
>> report bugs with addresses different than whatever their default
>> envelope sender is.
> 
> examples?

Here are a few example cases that I would consider reasonable:
 * Suppose the user has separate professional and personal email
accounts.  Their MTA is set to send as one of these accounts but they
may want to report the bug using either their personal account (if the
bug is not work-related) or professional account (if it affects systems
they maintain professionally).
 * To ease the sorting of messages, the user would prefer to report bugs
using <name+bts at domain.tld> to automatically tag responses "bts" but
would not want to set their address for all mail as
<name+bts at domain.tld> or to change the address each time reportbug is used.
 * The user is logged into a system as a contractor and the configured
email for their system is either temporary (e.g. for the duration of the
contract) or an email they prefer not to use for the purpose of
submitting bugs.

>>  Also that the From header should match the envelope
>> sender, where possible.
> 
> references to back up this assertion?

This was poorly phrased on my part.  It's not that all mail should have
the From header == envelope sender, but that when the envelope sender is
not set to the From address it opens the door for problems on some
systems.  If the MTA is not configured with a valid email address for
the user the envelope sender will be sent as a locally-qualified address
(e.g. user at hostname) which will be rejected by the BTS.[1]

Hopefully that explains my thoughts somewhat.  If you would like a
patch, let me know.

Cheers,
Kevin


1.   If a masquerade domain is set (so mail will be sent as
user at masquerade) in which the username does not receive mail it may be
rejected by sender verification depending on how the BTS is configured.
 I can test this if you like.