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The From: addresses used by Launchpad’s bug notifications have changed, to improve the chances of our messages being delivered over modern internet email.

Launchpad sends a lot of email, most of which is the result of Launchpad users performing some kind of action. For example, when somebody adds a comment to a bug, Launchpad sends that comment by email to everyone who’s subscribed to the bug.

Most of Launchpad was designed in an earlier era of internet email. In that era, it was perfectly reasonable to take the attitude that we were sending email on behalf of the user – in effect, being a fancy mail user agent or perhaps a little like a mailing list – and so if we generated an email that’s a direct result of something that a user did and consisting mostly of text they wrote, it made sense to put their email address in the From: header. Reply-To: was set so that replies would normally go to the appropriate place (the bug, in the case of bug notifications), but if somebody wanted to go to a bit of effort to start a private side conversation then it was easy to do so; and if email clients had automatic address books then those wouldn’t get confused because the address being used was a legitimate address belonging to the user in question.

Of course, some people always wanted to hide their addresses for obvious privacy reasons, so since 2006 Launchpad has had a “Hide my email address from other Launchpad users” switch (which you can set on your Change your personal details page), and since 2010 Launchpad has honoured this for bug notifications, so if you have that switch set then your bug comments will be sent out as something like “From: Your Name <bug-id@bugs.launchpad.net>“. This compromise worked tolerably well for a while.

But spammers and other bad actors ruin everything, and the internet email landscape has changed. It’s reasonably common now for operators of email domains to publish DMARC policies that require emails whose From: headers are within that domain to be authenticated in some way, and this is incompatible with the older approach. As a result, it’s been getting increasingly common for Launchpad bug notifications not to be delivered because they failed these authentication checks. Regardless of how justifiable our notification-sending practices were, we have to exist within the reality of internet email as it’s actually deployed.

So, thanks to a contribution from Thomas Ward, Launchpad now sends all its bug notifications as if the user in question had the “Hide my email address from other Launchpad users” switch set: that is, they’ll all appear as something like “From: Your Name <bug-id@bugs.launchpad.net>“. Over time we expect to extend this sort of approach to the other types of email that we send, possibly with different details depending on the situation.

Please let us know if this causes any strange behaviour in your email client. We may not be able to fix all of them, depending on how they interact with DMARC’s requirements, but we’d like to be aware of what’s going on.

Users of some email clients, particularly Gmail, have long had a problem filtering mail from Launchpad effectively.  We put lots of useful information into our message headers so that heavy users of Launchpad can automatically filter email into different folders.  Unfortunately, Gmail and some other clients do not support filtering mail on arbitrary headers, only on message bodies and on certain pre-defined headers such as Subject.  Figuring out what to do about this has been tricky.  Space in the Subject line is at a premium – many clients will only show a certain number of characters at the start, and so inserting filtering tags at the start would crowd out other useful information, so we don’t want to do that; and in general we want to avoid burdening one group of users with workarounds for the benefit of another group because that doesn’t scale very well, so we had to approach this with some care.

As of our most recent code update, you’ll find a new setting on your “Change your personal details” page:

If you check “Include filtering information in email footers”, Launchpad will duplicate some information from message headers into the signature part (below the dash-dash-space line) of message bodies: any “X-Launchpad-Something: value” header will turn into a “Launchpad-Something: value” line in the footer.  Since it’s below the signature marker, it should be relatively unobtrusive, but is still searchable.  You can search or filter for these in Gmail by putting the key/value pair in double quotes, like this:

At the moment this only works for emails related to Bazaar branches, Git repositories, merge proposals, and build failures.  We intend to extend this to a few other categories soon, particularly bug mail and package upload notifications.  If you particularly need this feature to work for some other category of email sent by Launchpad, please file a bug to let us know.

On the 5th of October we’ll be ending our beta of Mercurial imports in Launchpad. On that day your existing Mercurial imports will cease and you won’t be able to create new ones.

This doesn’t affect Bazaar, Git, Subversion or CVS imports.

You’re probably wondering why. During the beta, we found that not many people wanted to import Mercurial branches into Launchpad. Today there are only around forty people using the facility. It’s also fair to say that our importer wasn’t of the quality we want for Launchpad.

So, with low demand for the feature we decided to focus engineering effort elsewhere rather than continue to maintain, or fix up, a less than satisfactory feature.

I’m sorry if you currently rely on Launchpad to import code from Mercurial into Bazaar. You can, though, still use the bzr-hg plugin locally.

The Launchpad builders are currently operating at reduced build capacity. We are aware of the issue and have raised this with IS who are investigating the situation.  If you are having any issues with your builds please ask for help in #launchpad.

We apologise for the inconvenience and we’re sorry for the disruption to your service.

Launchpad’s code hosting will be unavailable, due to planned maintenance, for four hours starting 22.00 UTC on Friday the 17th August.

This will affect pushing to and pulling from branches, merge proposals, build from branch and translations activity involving code branches. It is in addition to the already announced disruption to Personal Package Archives for the same time.

Starts: 22.00 UTC 2012-08-17
Expected back by: 02.00 UTC 2012-08-18

We’re sorry for the disruption to your service.

Launchpad services will be affected by scheduled maintenance from 22:00 UTC Friday 17th August until 02:00 UTC Saturday 18th August.

During this time, you’ll be unable to upload or build PPA packages. However, packages will remain available for download from PPAs just like normal.

Maintenance starts: 22:00UTC Friday 17th August
Expected back: 02:00 UTC Saturday 18th August

Thanks for your patience while we maintain the hardware powering these services.

Launchpad PPA build services will be affected by an emergency maintenance between 07.00UTC and 19.00 UTC on Thursday 16th  August.

During this time there will be significantly reduced capacity in the PPA build farm.

Official Ubuntu distribution builders will be largely unaffected by this maintenance.

Interruption starts: 07.00 UTC 16th August 2012
Expected back: 19.00 UTC 16th August 2012

Thanks for your patience while we maintain the hardware powering these services.

Launchpad translations will be unavailable for around one hour, starting 10.00 UTC, on Tuesday 2011-11-29, to allow us to open the translations for the next Ubuntu release, Precise Pangolin (to be 12.04 LTS).

We tried this last week but hit some problems. Rather than prolong the disruption, we decided to bring translations back online and delay the opening of Precise’s translations until after we’d fixed the issue.

While we’re opening Precise’s translations, Launchpad will not be importing translation files and the web interface for making and reviewing translations will be unavailable. This includes imports for translation uploads, but also imports from Bazaar branches.

Once this is done, imports will resume normally and any backlog should be processed quickly after that.

Launchpad translations was due to be unavailable from 10.00 UTC for around one hour this morning to allow us to set up translations for the next Ubuntu release, Precise Pangolin (to be 12.04 LTS).

However, by about 10.15 UTC we encountered problems with data already in Precise’s translations. We weren’t sure how long it’d take to fix this issue, so decided it was better to reschedule the translations downtime for another day.

Sorry for the brief interruption to service. We’ll give you at least 24 hours notice before attempting this work again.

Launchpad translations will be unavailable for around one hour, starting 10.00 UTC, on Tuesday 2011-11-22.

During this time Launchpad will not be importing translation files and the web interface for making and reviewing translations will be unavailable. This includes imports for translation uploads, but also imports from Bazaar branches.

We are suspending the service temporarily to allow us to set up translations for the next Ubuntu release, Precise Pangolin (to be 12.04 LTS). Once this is done, imports will resume normally and any backlog should be processed quickly after that.