TracNotification

Email Notification of Ticket Changes¶

Trac supports notification of ticket changes via email.

Email notification is useful to keep users up-to-date on tickets of interest, and also provides a convenient way to post all ticket changes to a dedicated mailing list.

Disabled by default, notification can be activated and configured in trac.ini.

Receiving Notification Mails¶

When reporting a new ticket or adding a comment, enter a valid email address or your Trac username in the reporter, assigned to/owner or cc field. Trac may send you an email when changes are made to the ticket, depending on how your notification preferences are configured.

Permission groups can also be entered in the CC field, to notify all members of the group.

How to use your username to receive notification mails¶

To receive notification mails, you can either enter a full email address or your Trac username. To get notified with a simple username or login, you need to specify a valid email address in your preferences.

Alternatively, a default domain name (\smtp_default_domain\) can be set in the TracIni file, see Configuration Options below. In this case, the default domain will be appended to the username, which can be useful for an "Intranet" kind of installation.

When using apache and mod_kerb for authentication against Kerberos / Active Directory, usernames take the form (\username@EXAMPLE.LOCAL\). To avoid this being interpreted as an email address, add the Kerberos domain to (\ignore_domains\).

Ticket attachment notifications¶

Since 1.0.3 Trac will send notifications when a ticket attachment is added or deleted. Usually attachment notifications will be enabled in an environment by default. To disable the attachment notifications for an environment the \TicketAttachmentNotifier\ component must be disabled:

[components]
trac.ticket.notification.TicketAttachmentNotifier = disabled

Configuring SMTP Notification¶

Configuration Options¶

These are the available options for the \notification\ section in trac.ini:

[TracIni(section=notification)]

Example Configuration (SMTP)¶

[notification]
smtp_enabled = true
smtp_server = mail.example.com
smtp_from = notifier@example.com
smtp_replyto = myproj@projects.example.com
smtp_always_cc = ticketmaster@example.com, theboss+myproj@example.com

Example Configuration (\sendmail\)¶

[notification]
smtp_enabled = true
email_sender = SendmailEmailSender
sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail
smtp_from = notifier@example.com
smtp_replyto = myproj@projects.example.com
smtp_always_cc = ticketmaster@example.com, theboss+myproj@example.com

Subscriber Configuration¶

The default subscriptions are configured in the "[notification-subscriber"] section.

[TracIni(section=notification-subscriber)]

Each user can override these defaults in their Notifications preferences.

For example to unsubscribe from notifications for one's own changes and comments, the rule "Never notify: I update a ticket" should be added above other subscription rules.

The subscription rule name on the left side of the \=\ can be anything, it has no meaning outside this configuration file. The subscriber name on the right side of the \=\ must be one of the subscribers listed in the above table.

The following attributes of default subscriptions can be configured:

• Other values require plugins. For example \on-site\ requires th:OnSiteNotificationsPlugin.

• \.distributor\ (Default: \email\)

• Smaller values override larger values.
• If you use \0\, then users will not be able to override this rule.

• \.priority\ (Default: \100\)

• \never\ can be used to silence other subscription rules with higher values.

• \.adverb\ (Default: \always\)

• Other values require plugins. For example \text/html\ requires th:TracHtmlNotificationPlugin.

• \.format\ (Default: \text/plain\)

Example Configuration (default subscriptions)¶

[notification-subscriber]
always_notify_owner = TicketOwnerSubscriber
always_notify_owner.distributor = email
always_notify_owner.priority = 100
always_notify_owner.adverb = always
always_notify_owner.format = text/plain

always_notify_previous_updater = TicketPreviousUpdatersSubscriber

never_notify_updater = TicketUpdaterSubscriber
never_notify_updater.adverb = never
never_notify_updater.priority = 0

notify_cc_html = CarbonCopySubscriber
notify_cc_html.format = text/html

Customizing the email subject¶

The email subject can be customized with the \ticket_subject_template\ option, which contains a Genshi text template snippet. The default value is:

${prefix} #${ticket.id}: ${summary}

The following variables are available in the template:

• \changes\: The ticket changes (prepared by Ticket.get_change).
• \env\: The project environment (see env.py).
• \prefix\: The prefix defined in \smtp_subject_prefix\.
• \summary\: The ticket summary, with the old value if the summary was edited.
• \ticket\: The ticket model object (see model.py). Individual ticket fields can be addressed by appending the field name separated by a dot, eg \${ticket.milestone}\.

Customizing the email content #CustomizingContent¶

The notification email content is generated based on \ticket_notify_email.txt\ in \trac/ticket/templates\. You can add your own version of this template by adding a \ticket_notify_email.txt\ to the templates directory of your environment. The default is:

${ticket_body_hdr}
${ticket_props}
# if ticket.new:
${ticket.description}
# else:
#   if changes_body:
${_('Changes (by %(author)s):', author=change.author)}

${changes_body}
#   endif
#   if changes_descr:
#     if not changes_body and not change.comment and change.author:
${_('Description changed by %(author)s:', author=change.author)}
#     endif
${changes_descr}
--
#   endif
#   if change.comment:

${_('Comment:') if changes_body else
  _('Comment (by %(author)s):', author=change.author)}

${change.comment}
#   endif
# endif
${'-- '}
${_('Ticket URL: <%(link)s>', link=ticket.link)}
${project.name} <${project.url or abs_href()}>
${project.descr}

See the cookbook for additional template customization recipes.

Sample Email¶

#42: testing
---------------------------+------------------------------------------------
       Id:  42             |      Status:  assigned
Component:  report system  |    Modified:  Fri Apr  9 00:04:31 2004
 Severity:  major          |   Milestone:  0.9
 Priority:  lowest         |     Version:  0.6
    Owner:  anonymous      |    Reporter:  jonas@example.com
---------------------------+------------------------------------------------
Changes:
  * component:  changeset view => search system
  * priority:  low => highest
  * owner:  jonas => anonymous
  * cc:  daniel@example.com =>
         daniel@example.com, jonas@example.com
  * status:  new => assigned

Comment:
I'm interested too!

--
Ticket URL: <http://example.com/trac/ticket/42>
My Project <http://myproj.example.com/>

Using GMail as the SMTP relay host¶

Use the following configuration snippet:

[notification]
smtp_enabled = true
use_tls = true
mime_encoding = base64
smtp_server = smtp.gmail.com
smtp_port = 587
smtp_user = user
smtp_password = password

where user and password match an existing GMail account, ie the ones you use to log in on https://gmail.com.

Alternatively, you can use \smtp_port = 25\.
You should not use \smtp_port = 465\. Doing so may deadlock your ticket submission. Port 465 is reserved for the SMTPS protocol, which is not supported by Trac. See #7107 for details.

Troubleshooting¶

If notifications are not working, inspect the log for error messages.

Notification errors are not always reported through the web interface, so the user who submits a change or creates a ticket may not get notified about a notification failure. The Trac administrator needs to look at the log to find the error message and traceback.

Permission denied error¶

Typical error message:

  ...
  File ".../smtplib.py", line 303, in connect
    raise socket.error, msg
  error: (13, 'Permission denied')

This error usually comes from a security settings on the server: many Linux distributions do not allow the web server (Apache, ...) to post email messages to the local SMTP server.

Many users get confused when their manual attempts to contact the SMTP server succeed:

telnet localhost 25

This is because a regular user may connect to the SMTP server, but the web server cannot:

sudo -u www-data telnet localhost 25

In such a case, you need to configure your server so that the web server is authorized to post to the SMTP server. The actual settings depend on your Linux distribution and current security policy. You may find help in the Trac MailingList archive.

Relevant ML threads:

• SELinux: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.subversion.trac.general/7518

For SELinux in Fedora 10:

$ setsebool -P httpd_can_sendmail 1

Suspected spam error¶

Some SMTP servers may reject the notification email sent by Trac.

The default Trac configuration uses Base64 encoding to send emails to the recipients. The whole body of the email is encoded, which sometimes trigger false positive spam detection on sensitive email servers. In such an event, change the default encoding to "quoted-printable" using the \mime_encoding\ option.

Quoted printable encoding works better with languages that use one of the Latin charsets. For Asian charsets, stick with the Base64 encoding.

See also: TracTickets, TracIni, TracGuide, trac:TracDev/NotificationApi