Mailing list digest shows wrong Senders in summary

• Key: INFRA-370
• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Resolution: Won't Fix
• Priority: Minor
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Jeff Turner
• Component/s: JIRA, Mail (qmail)

Description

It looks like the digest emails are being sent out with incorrect summaries, showing wrong senders. For example, see attached derby-dev digest. The summary says:

derby-dev Digest 2 Jun 2005 20:52:25 -0000 Issue 322
                                                                                                                        
Topics (messages 5063 through 5089):
.....
[jira] Updated: (DERBY-318) SYS.SYSCOLUMN problem with "GENERATED BY DEFAULT" column w/ Network Server
        5078 by: Philip Wilder (JIRA)


But Philip Wilder did not make that particular update, nor most of the others the summary claims. The body of that email in the digest is:

Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 22:19:02 +0200 (CEST)
From: "Samuel Andrew McIntyre (JIRA)" <[e-mail]>
Subject: [jira] Updated: (DERBY-318) SYS.SYSCOLUMN problem with "GENERATED BY DEFAULT" column w/ Network Server
To: [e-mail]
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>


It looks like the digest software may be being confused by JIRA's From format, which is "Joe Bloggs (JIRA) <[e-mail]>", where "Joe Bloggs" varies, but "[e-mail]" is always the same. Perhaps it caches the "Joe Bloggs" part.

Comments

Digest messages are generated by ezmlm-get (part of the ezmlm-idx package).

ezmlm-idx assumes that the address part of the From field is unique, as required by Internet e-mail. It uses a hash of that address for author comparisons while building the summary table in memory, saving only the first "author" seen for each unique address.

The code that does this is in ezmlm-idx-0.40/idxthread.c and the line

          res = str_diffn(pautht->auth,auth,HASHLEN);

could possibly be "fixed" by replacing it with

          res = str_diffn(pautht->auth,auth,authlen);

OTOH, it might also cause ezmlm to puke and die, and we currently rely on freebsd ports for the ezmlm-idx install.

Since a better solution is to use the poster's real address in the From header field of messages sent by JIRA, rather than a generic jira address, I see no reason to fix this in ezmlm.

[Noel J. Bergman]

I agree with Roy that the fix should be in JIRA. Perhaps as simple as using the proper From: header, and adding a Reply-To: header, e.g.,

   From: Joe Bloggs (JIRA) <[e-mail]>"
   Reply-To: <[e-mail]>

Sender: would not be right, in this case, because the mailing list is not the sender. We just want to control the reply.