It makes a lot of sense to target the commonly troubled areas like this one. My guess is this will be an ongoing issues as mail clients and servers are always changing with new releases. It would help to collect the problematic emails somehow and queue them to be resent to another email address on request. There is already the view source option so that people could paste the source into a submission form. Changing the To header should be simple, but I do not know how to add resend those messages without messing up their headers.
In a Linux/FreeBSD environment I can create a text file called message.txt and place the body of a message into it. Then call this command...
cat message.txt | -s "Test Message" -F tester1@roundcube.net
But we need a way to preserve most of the original headers so that attachments will still work when resending the message to the different address for testing. Once we do have a way to resend messages we can set up this sequence...
- User finds problematic message
- User copies source of message
- User pastes message into web form to collection test messages (perhaps at www.roundcube.net/testing/submitmessage.php)
- Tester views incoming test messages (each submission is assigned a number)
- Tester requests a message to be sent to a test email address (perhaps at www.roundcube.net/testing/requestmessage.php)
- Tester views the same message with same RC version to view same problem
- Tester reviews the message to write up bug report (perhaps combining with existing bug report)
Naturally the user should be warned to remove personal information in the email they do not want the testers to see. When they paste the message into the submission form they could delete out parts of the body possibly.
Finally, I would set up a limited group of test/developer accounts so that the message request form will not allow sending those messages arbitrary addresses for obvious privacy concerns.
tester1 -> jim.pingle@roundcube.net tester2 -> eric.stadtherr@roundcube.net tester3 -> brennan.stehling@roundcube.net developer1 -> thomas.bruederli@roundcube.net developer2 -> charles.mcnulty@roundcube.net
These addresses can be aliases so that they can go to one of the test RC installations which we have set up either on servers provided by the SAs who have volunteered their services.
If anyone has an idea on how to add these collected message back to the mail spool I would like to know how that can be done.
Brennan
On Sat, 23 Dec 2006 16:13:14 -0500, Jim Pingle lists@pingle.org wrote:
Eric Stadtherr wrote:
In light of the recent discussions, I've been browsing through the Trac tickets trying to get a feel for the distribution of bugs (display, database, IMAP interface, etc.). There appear to be quite a few tickets that follow the pattern of "RoundCube exhibits incorrect behavior when displaying an e-mail with <some special characteristics>." These special cases range from message header contents to HTML contents to attachment formats.
I noticed that as well, an a lot of them are very close in description to the point where they could easily be the same issue, or completely different but unless people post sample messages, there is no easy way to be sure.
Instead of trying to fabricate my own e-mail messages that match these special cases (and possible get it wrong), what does everyone think about standing up a "test case" e-mail account on an IMAP server somewhere that people can send these "special case" messages to? The RC development team could then each access this IMAP server from their own RC installations to troubleshoot the handling of the messages.
Elsewhere in this thread I had mentioned coming up with a lot of sample messages in many varying formats. When you take all of the different formats and different clients and think about how many variations there are, the amount of test messages could easily be very large! It would really be nice if every client supported "standards" in the same way. :) See my recent ticket about HTML attachments (#1484178), three different clients I tried formatted the same message three different ways and only one is parsed as expected. Plus I'm sure there are client options that change how some behave in each of these cases as well (inline vs attached files, MIME vs plain text, etc, etc...)
We'd have to keep the login credentials relatively secure, and somebody would have to volunteer an IMAP server.
What does everyone think?
Sounds like a good idea to me. Should there also perhaps be a web form somewhere that would inject messages into the mailbox of said account? It might help people who have trouble forwarding messages as attachments. That could be a security nightmare though.
Alternately, ticket #1484157 could be implemented to have the ability to forward messages as attachments directly from RoundCube. It might also be nice to have an option that would detect whether or not a message is an attached e-mail, and optionally detach it from the e-mail and place it in the current mailbox. In Thunderbird, this is possible with the "Thunderbird Attachment Tools" extension. ( http://www.supportware.net/mozilla/#ext9 but their site is down at the moment.) It can pull an rfc822 message out of an e-mail and into the current folder. Even if you can't do this in RoundCube that extension could still come in handy for tasks like this.
Jim
-- Brennan Stehling Offwhite.net LLC brennan@offwhite.net -- Brennan Stehling Offwhite.net LLC brennan@offwhite.net