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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 will automatically send you an email when changes are made to the ticket, depending on how notification is configured.
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
Important: The [[TracIni#trac-base_url-option|[trac] base_url]] option must be configured for links in the notification message to be correctly generated.
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 [TracIni#notification-subscriber-section "[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:
.distributor(Default:email)- Other values require plugins. For example
on-siterequires th:OnSiteNotificationsPlugin. .priority(Default:100)- Smaller values override larger values.
- If you use
0, then users will not be able to override this rule. .adverb(Default:always)nevercan be used to silence other subscription rules with higher values..format(Default:text/plain)- Other values require plugins. For example
text/htmlrequires th:TracHtmlNotificationPlugin.
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}: ${summary}
The following variables are available in the template:
env: The project environment object (see env.py).prefix: The prefix defined insmtp_subject_prefix.summary: The ticket summary, with the old value if the summary was edited.ticket: The ticket model object (see model.py). Individual ticket fields can be accessed by appending the field name separated by a dot, eg${ticket.milestone}.
Customizing the email content
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
{% 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 %}\\
${_('Comment:') if changes_body else _('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
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:
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, TracDev/NotificationApi