Issue 78: Broadcast Email
Status:  WontFix
Owner:
Closed:  Nov 2013
Cc:
Reported by code-rev...@gtempaccount.com, Sep 24, 2009
Reported by Brad Larson <bklarson@gmail.com> on Mon Feb 16 13:23:41 PST 2009
Source: JIRA GERRIT-78
Affected Version: 2.0.2

It would be nice if I could broadcast an email to all Gerrit users.  The main
use-case is so I can notify them when I update the server and send out a
change log.  It would also be useful for alerting users about scheduled
downtime.
Sep 24, 2009
#1 code-rev...@gtempaccount.com
Comment by Shawn Pearce <sop@google.com> on Mon Feb 16 16:31:57 PST 2009

We should ensure users have a way to opt-out of these messages, with some per-
account setting in their account settings page, just like the project new
change notifications.

I'm not sure that Gerrit as a list daemon is the best way to handle this.
Message distribution to 20 or so people by direct BCC in the SMTP session is
reasonable, message distribution to 1200+ people by direct BCC is somewhat
insane.  Maybe what we want is some sort of integration with mailing list
management software or Google Groups where, where the mailing list can be used
to handle distribution.
Sep 24, 2009
#2 code-rev...@gtempaccount.com
Comment by Brad Larson <bklarson@gmail.com> on Mon Feb 16 18:22:31 PST 2009

Yeah you are right, straight SMTP emails is a bad solution and outside the
scope of Gerrit.  I'm not very familiar with many mailing list management
packages... it'd be nice if there was something we could control from within
the Gerrit admin panel, but maybe a 3rd party website-based solution is more
reasonable.   I'll try to look around when I get a chance.
Sep 24, 2009
#3 code-rev...@gtempaccount.com
Comment by Shawn Pearce <sop@google.com> on Mon Feb 16 19:02:32 PST 2009

What do you mean by "something we could control from within the Gerrit admin
panel" ?

Are you looking for a way for individual users to join/leave the announcement
list?
Or a way for the admin to post an announcement to the announcement list?

Enrolling users in a Google Group or a Yahoo! Group via some external site is
probably difficult/impossible.  For good reasons I think both sites try to
avoid allowing 3rd parties from subscribing users without their
acknowledgement.  But other packages like mailman might be easier to to dupe
into adding/removing users by Gerrit action.

For smaller deployments with only 50 or so users, a direct SMTP solution from
Gerrit is really quick and easy.  But once you start to get over that limit we
would need to implement some sort of queue in Gerrit and break the outgoing
messages into bundles of 20-50 addresses, BCC'ing them.  Keeping track of
which addresses we've sent to and which we haven't is the ugly part, and why
I'd rather defer this to a mailing list management package.  Also those
packages tend to integrate with the host SMTP daemon, letting the SMTP daemon
handle the list explosion, which is a lot more efficient on the SMTP daemon's
message queuing system.  But its a heck of a lot harder to setup and
configure.  As it is, Gerrit is difficult to install.
Sep 24, 2009
#4 code-rev...@gtempaccount.com
Comment by Brad Larson <bklarson@gmail.com> on Wed Feb 18 14:11:32 PST 2009

Well, in my use-case, I don't need/want many features at all.  I'd like to
keep it as simple to use as possible.  I envision an announcement list that
new users are automatically subscribed to when they register an email
address.  If they don't want announcements, they can unsubscribe from their
settings menu.  The administrators can send out announcements from a page in
the admin menu.

I'll be perfectly happy if we decide that this is outside the scope of
Gerrit.  Setting up an external mailing list is easy enough, but it would be
convenient if I didn't have to.

I agree that adding 'now configure this email list management package' to the
Gerrit install is a bad idea.  My first reaction is that maybe it wouldn't be
too hard to add a subthread to go through an email queue to batch them up...
but I tend to oversimplify these things.
Sep 24, 2009
#5 code-rev...@gtempaccount.com
Comment by Shawn Pearce <sop@google.com> on Wed Feb 18 14:22:04 PST 2009

Ok.

I don't need this particular feature for Android Open Source Project, or even
within a deployment at Google.

But I can see use cases for groups <50 where we can probably get away with
BCC'ing everyone in a single SMTP connection.

So I'll entertain patches to add this functionality if someone writes it.
I'll even review them, and if they are reasonably sane and appear to function
as advertised, submit them.  But I personally don't need this feature, and
won't be coding it.  :)
Sep 24, 2009
#6 code-rev...@gtempaccount.com
Update by Shawn Pearce <sop@google.com> on Wed Feb 18 14:34:58 PST 2009

Assigned to Brad Larson.
Sep 24, 2009
#7 code-rev...@gtempaccount.com
Comment by Brad Larson <bklarson@gmail.com> on Wed Feb 18 14:35:35 PST 2009

You are more than fair :)

It is a low priority for me as well, but I might get to it after I take care
of some other things.  Thanks for your help!
Sep 24, 2009
#8 sop+code@google.com
(No comment was entered for this change.)
Status: Accepted
Owner: bklarson
Oct 26, 2009
Project Member #9 m.bn...@gmail.com
(No comment was entered for this change.)
Cc: m.bnovc
Nov 20, 2013
#10 sop@google.com
(No comment was entered for this change.)
Status: WontFix