Launchpad Mail

There are various kinds of emails in Launchpad:

1. Mailing lists (represented by Launchpad teams). A mailing list has an address TEAM_NAME@lists.launchpad.net, archives (https://lists.launchpad.net/TEAM_NAME), and an administrative interface (https://lists.canonical.com/mailman/admin/TEAM_NAME). Launchpad uses Mailman to process these kinds of mails.

2. Emails sent from one user to another (that is, an email sent "by" Launchpad, but really sent by user Alice when Alice uses the https://edge.launchpad.net/~barry/+contactuser form to contact user Barry.

3. Emails sent by Launchpad itself, such as emails sent to subscribers when a bug is changed.
4. Emails received by Launchpad itself, such as emails sent by users to manipulate the bug tracker.

We should document all these kinds of email here, but right now this page is really in draft state, so it's just a grab bag of various information. We'll continue to improve it; please help us if you can.

Configuring Mail

Outgoing mail is configured using configs, so you'll need a config that puts outgoing mail somewhere you can see it. Like so:

WARNING: this configuration info may be outdated; it's taken from documentation that was last modified in Sep 2008:

   <configure
       xmlns="http://namespaces.zope.org/zope"
       xmlns:mail="http://namespaces.zope.org/mail"
       i18n_domain="zope">
   
       <mail:smtpMailer
           name="smtp"
           hostname="mail.wooz.org"
           port="25"
           />
   
       <mail:stubMailer
           name="barry"
           from_addr="barry@wooz.org"
           to_addr="barry@wooz.org"
           mailer="smtp"
           rewrite="false"
           />
   
       <mail:testMailer name="test-mailer" />
   
       <mail:mboxMailer
           name="mbox"
           filename="/tmp/launchpad.mbox"
           overwrite="true"
           mailer="test-mailer"
           />
   
   <!--
   
       <mail:queuedDelivery permission="zope.SendMail"
           queuePath="/var/tmp/launchpad_mailqueue" mailer="barry" />
   
   -->
   
       <mail:directDelivery
           mailer="mbox"
           permission="zope.SendMail"
           />
   
   </configure>

You can then specify the config to make:

   make LPCONFIG=+abentley run_all

Mailing List Archives

In the course of working on bug #357775 (mailing list archive UI improvements), we used these steps to test the new archive interface code:

1. Start launchpad.test with 'make run_all'. (See Getting and Running.)

2. Log in to launchpad.test as "foo.bar@canonical.com" (this test user should already exist, and have the appropriate administrative privileges).

3. Create a new team mltest.

4. Create a mailing list for that team.

5. Approve the mailing list at https://launchpad.test/+mailinglists.

6. Inject the sample data, which you get from http://launchpadlibrarian.net/26091302/lp-ml-test-data.tar.gz:

   1. tar zxfv lp-ml-test-data.tar.gz

   2. cd lp-ml-test-data/

   3. ./inject.sh ## (while launchpad.test is running, of course) ##

      There are 999 messages in the data. They're originally from the Emacs Devel mailing list archive, but although I've left the names the same, the sender ("From:") addresses have all been replaced with <foo.bar@canonical.com>, so they will successfully load into a list whose only owner/subscriber is foo.bar@canonical.com. If you have any problems loading the messages, try:

            ls -lR /var/tmp/mailman/qfiles    (it should be empty)
            tail -f /var/tmp/mailman/logs/*

7. Visit the archive: http://lists.launchpad.test/mltest/maillist.html

You should see the first of five index pages there. Click on the "go to Thread Index" link to make sure the thread index is working too (http://lists.launchpad.test/mltest/threads.html).

See the original merge proposal for details.