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/issues of interest, and also provides a convenient way to post all ticket changes to a dedicated mailing list. For example, this is how the ​Trac-tickets mailing list is set up.

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 username in the reporter, assigned to/owner or cc field. Trac will automatically send you an email when changes are made to the ticket (depending on how notification is configured).

This is useful to keep up-to-date on an issue or enhancement request that interests you.

How to use your username to receive notification mails

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

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).

Configuring SMTP Notification

Important: For TracNotification to work correctly, the [trac] base_url option must be set in trac.ini.

Configuration Options

These are the available options for the [notification] section in trac.ini.

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

Customizing the e-mail subject

The e-mail 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:

• 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, e.g. $ticket.milestone.

Customizing the e-mail content

The notification e-mail 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 looks like this:

$ticket_body_hdr
$ticket_props
{% choose ticket.new %}\
{%   when True %}\
$ticket.description
{%   end %}\
{%   otherwise %}\
{%     if changes_body %}\
${_('Changes (by %(author)s):', author=change.author)}

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

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

$change.comment
{%     end %}\
{%   end %}\
{% end %}\

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

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:  changset 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/>

Customizing e-mail content for MS Outlook

Out-of-the-box, MS Outlook normally presents plain text e-mails with a variable-width font; the ticket properties table will most certainly look like a mess in MS Outlook. This can be fixed with some customization of the e-mail template.

Replace the following second row in the template:

$ticket_props

with this instead (requires Python 2.6 or later):

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
{% with
   pv = [(a[0].strip(), a[1].strip()) for a in [b.split(':') for b in
         [c.strip() for c in 
          ticket_props.replace('|', '\n').splitlines()[1:-1]] if ':' in b]];
   sel = ['Reporter', 'Owner', 'Type', 'Status', 'Priority', 'Milestone', 
          'Component', 'Severity', 'Resolution', 'Keywords'] %}\
${'\n'.join('%s\t%s' % (format(p[0]+':', ' <12'), p[1]) for p in pv if p[0] in sel)}
{% end %}\
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

The table of ticket properties is replaced with a list of a selection of the properties. A tab character separates the name and value in such a way that most people should find this more pleasing than the default table, when using MS Outlook.

Important: Only those ticket fields that are listed in sel are part of the HTML mail. If you have defined custom ticket fields which shall be part of the mail they have to be added to sel, example:

   sel = ['Reporter', ..., 'Keywords', 'Custom1', 'Custom2']

However, it's not as perfect as an automatically HTML-formatted e-mail would be, but presented ticket properties are at least readable by default in MS Outlook...

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, i.e. the ones you use to log in on ​http://gmail.com

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

Filtering notifications for one's own changes and comments

In Gmail, use the filter:

from:(<smtp_from>) (("Reporter: <username>" -Changes -Comment) OR "Changes (by <username>)" OR "Comment (by <username>)")

to delete these notifications.

In Thunderbird, there is no such solution if you use IMAP (see ​http://kb.mozillazine.org/Filters_(Thunderbird)#Filtering_the_message_body).

You can also add this plugin: ​http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/NeverNotifyUpdaterPlugin, or vote for ​#2247 to be fixed.

Troubleshooting

If you cannot get the notification working, first make sure the log is activated and have a look at the log to find if an error message has been logged. See TracLogging for help about the log feature.

Notification errors are not reported through the web interface, so the user who submit a change or a new ticket never gets notified about a notification failure. The Trac administrator needs to look at the log to find the error trace.

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 let the web server (Apache, ...) to post email message to the local SMTP server.

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

telnet localhost 25

The trouble is that 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 browsing 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, it is recommended to 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, it is recommended to stick with the Base64 encoding.

501, 5.5.4 Invalid Address error

On IIS 6.0 you could get a

Failure sending notification on change to ticket #1: SMTPHeloError: (501, '5.5.4 Invalid Address')

in the trac log. Have a look ​here for instructions on resolving it.

See also: TracTickets, TracIni, TracGuide