Bugzilla – Bug 158184
lost bug-buddy reports on DHCP+NAT connected machines
Last modified: 2006-09-30 05:17:12 UTC
bug-buddy expects correctly configured sendmail/postfix. But with NATted DHCP clients, it will never work, because submit@bugs.gnome.org (and probably also Novell bugzilla) will reject such mail. This mail will be deferred and bounced to local UNIX mbox (which is not read by many users). Possible fixes: 1) Change default sending style in bug buddy. 2) Preconfigure postfix/sendmail by the network manager (needs mail relay provided by DHCP, if it is possible). 3) Report upstream and change reject rules for preconfigured Bugzilla mail servers.
The default (and wise) MDA policy (most probably used for Bugzilla MDA) is "Reject mails from unresolvable domains". This feature is required to be able to accept mails from MTA hidden behind NAT. hammer:~ # mailq -Queue ID- --Size-- ----Arrival Time---- -Sender/Recipient------- E062936682 25169 Mon Mar 13 18:34:48 sbrabec@hammer.suse.cz (host mail.gnome.org[209.132.176.177] said: 450 <sbrabec@hammer.suse.cz>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found (in reply to MAIL FROM command)) submit@bugs.gnome.org -- 24 Kbytes in 1 Request.
Eventually, bugzilla.gnome.org and bug-buddy are moving to an xmlrpc interface (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=138269 / http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=133765). Short term, it seems like mail.gnome.org is broken and ought to be accepting mail from anyone if it's addressed to "submit@bugs.gnome.org".
Acepting mails from unresolvable domains is a special MDA setting (turned off by default for modern OSes) and has to have a good incoming spam filter - enabling it increases number of incoming spam in a factor of about 30. I guess that Bugzilla mails are specially formatted and it should be easy to trash spam.
A well configured mail server newer will accept a mail with sender domain like "hammer.suse.cz". Because of the enorm quantity of spam the ISP's test the identity of each eMail. The safest (most assured) way to send an email from a NAT-ed network is to use relayhost. As I know there is no DHCP-Option to provide the mail relay.
GNOME in default setup knows nothing about mail relay. And nothing in GNOME except bug-buddy needs configured local postfix.
What did upstream say larry?
Few random ideas on possible fix: 1) Installation process can try to detect NAT. If NAT will be detected, YaST will show MTA configuration during installation. If user skips its configuration, sendmail/postfix will be set to not accept mails. 2) Try to detect NAT. If it is active and FROM_HEADER="" in /etc/sysconfig/mail start YaST MTA settings. 3) If possible, use some SMTP commands to check, whether the mail will be accepted.
I can't convince myself this is major.
bug buddy uses soap in 10.2 now and can fall back to saving on the desktop in the error case so I think this is solved now.