Email routing

routing mechanism will be a dotted path from the project to the application/plugin to the specific artifact within that app that is used like this:

subproject.app.artifact@project.example.com

Which would translate into the devtools project which is a subproject of turbogears, and it's bug tracer and issue 142 in that tracker:

devtools.bug.142@turbogears.sf.net

And it in turn would be published to any reactor-plugins that listen on:

turbogears.*
turbogears.devtools.*
turbogears.devtools.bug.*

If your app has more than one artifact type, you could nest them inside project.app.something.id.*

If you were working with the bug tracker directly on the TurboGears project:

bug.142@turbogears.sf.net

The PyForge platform allows you to setup other message types, such as commit messages, to go into amqp with the same routing information, and turn into "messages" just like e-mail.

Jon and Wolf have basically already created the routing for this stuff, and an amqp based message bus on which e-mail message contents can be placed.

Email Content Handling

On the new forge message bodies should be composed as markdown. Multi-part mime encoded messages should be sent include plain text (the markdown) and html (rendered from the markdown).

Users are allowed to register that they want plain text only.

The html2text tool written in python was offered as a way to turn HTML formatted e-mails that we recieve into plain text that is formatted in a markdown compatible way. We will have to investigate this a bit more, but it looks like a great idea.

We discussed using a special syntax and set of lines at the top of the message to indicate metadata:

Title:   My Document
Summary: A brief description of my document.
Authors: Waylan Limberg, John Doe
Date:    October 2, 2007
base_url: http://example.com

This is the first paragraph of the document.

The format for this syntax was developed in our original PyForge requirements doc, and is pretty much exactly the same as what's used by an existing markdown extension (markdown-meta), so with two independent implementations, we decided that it was the "natural" way to report metadata in e-mail message bodies.

We will also include some text in the footer of the e-mail message with a link to the message online. We can use this link to guess where in the thread the message belongs in the case of a messed up e-mail client that does not set the the headers for the reply properly.

The nice thing about this is that it's pretty much already implemented for us via the meta plugin.

This metadata syntax will let you set fields on tickets and otherwise interact with the system via e-mail, assuming you have such permissions.

Spam

A production deployment of PyForge is likely to have some spam pre-filtering applied as a first layer of spam defense. The second layer will be some in-app bayesian filtering done inside the Lamson python server that's included in PyForge itself.

We'll build a web UI where user feedback can be turned into data that feeds back to the bayesian filter training. We will also have to build some level of user moderation into the system, based on what's done at slashdot already.

Spam prevention technology is a rabbit hole down which the PyForge could go forever, without finding a prefect solution. The goal for launch is not perfection, but a solid foundation on which future anti-spam measures can be taken.