[jira] [Created] (WHIMSY-30) Redo secmail

["Sam Ruby (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Sam Ruby created WHIMSY-30:
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             Summary: Redo secmail
                 Key: WHIMSY-30
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/WHIMSY-30
             Project: Whimsy
          Issue Type: Bug
            Reporter: Sam Ruby


Currently secmail is a toll that runs on minotaur, reads mbox files, implements a number of heuristics, and writes to svn (documents/received).  Issues:

 * infrastructure plans are to retire minotaur
 * mbox files may be going away as a primary mechanism for storing mail
 * the heuristics implemented, while useful, may at times produce incorrect results -- ignoring some files and not handling others correctly.
 * writes to svn is occasionally problematic, which includes both transient problems (svn or LDAP down) and software problems (e.g., workbench leaving around empty directories) 
 * overall, having the secmail as a separate process makes error recovery and debugging more difficult.  A malformed email (typically spam) can wedge the process entirely.

Install a mail server on whimsy-vm (probably dovecot) and add whimsy-vm to the secretary mail alias.  Change the secretary workbench to parse email from the dovecot mbox files instead of the documents/received directory.

Advantages:

* decouples secmail from the infrastructure plans for changing how mail is processed
* can reduce and/or eliminate heuristics.  We can start from scratch (show all emails) and incrementally add rules which will hide emails that match a given pattern.
* should svn be down, the user of the workbench will quickly be aware of that and will try again later; this is fundamentally more resilient than automated processes.
* spam will never be put in svn.  It also won't be able to wedge the tool.  Badly formed emails can simply be deleted from the mbox file.




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