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.
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.
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).
Important: For TracNotification to work correctly, the [trac] base_url option must be set in trac.ini.
These are the available options for the [notification] section in trac.ini.
Either smtp_from or smtp_replyto (or both) must be set, otherwise Trac refuses to send notification mails.
The following options are specific to email delivery through SMTP.
The following option is specific to email delivery through a sendmail-compatible executable.
[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
[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
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:
The notification e-mail content is generated based on ticket_notify_email.txt in trac/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
#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/>
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.
| Reporter: | jonas@example.com |
| Owner: | anonymous |
| Type: | defect |
| Status: | assigned |
| Priority: | lowest |
| Milestone: | 0.9 |
| Component: | report system |
| Severity: | major |
| Resolution: | |
| Keywords: |
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...
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.
In Gmail, use the filter:
from:(<smtp_from>) (("Reporter: <username>" -Changes) OR "Changes (by <username>)")
For Trac .10, 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).
The best you can do is to set "always_notify_updater" in conf/trac.ini to false. You will however still get an email if you comment a ticket that you own or have reported.
You can also add this plugin: http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/NeverNotifyUpdaterPlugin
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.
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:
For SELinux in Fedora 10:
$ setsebool -P httpd_can_sendmail 1
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.
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