Filtering bug mail

Rationale

The amount of bug mail can be quite overwhelming, especially if you are subscribed to a lot of packages. However, different kind of bug mail has different priorities, so you should not just route all of them in one huge folder that you don't look at very often, but use some more clever filtering.

For example, if people subscribe you to a bug, then they are usually blocked for a response from you, thus these mails should be answered promptly and thus get sorted into your high-priority folder. On the other hand, the bulk of bug mail will probably be from your /+packagebugs, i. e. for packages which you are subscribed to; these can usually be dealt with in large batches and low priority, when you are in the mood for bug triage.

Launchpad bug email makes that easy!

For quite a while now, Launchpad bug mail has a X-Launchpad-Message-Rationale: header which describes why you got this mail. It is a machine parseable form of the "You received this bug notification because..." sentence that every bug mail has at the bottom. For example,

• X-Launchpad-Message-Rationale: Assignee	this bug is assigned to you, high priority
  X-Launchpad-Message-Rationale: Subscriber	direct subscription, high priority
  X-Launchpad-Message-Rationale: Subscriber @ubuntu-sru	subscription of a team you are in, priority depends on your involvement in that team
  X-Launchpad-Message-Rationale: Subscriber (sudo in ubuntu)	low-priority bulk processing

So depending on how much bug email you get through team subscriptions, you should filter your email to two (subscribers @team/subscriber (package-product-etc)) or three or more (separate some or all teams) mail boxes.

In addtion to the X-Launchpad-Message-Rationale: header Launchpad provides some other useful headers, including X-Launchpad-Bug:, X-Launchpad-Bug-Tags, X-Launchpad-Bug-Reporter, X-Launchpad-Bug-Modifier, X-Launchpad-Bug-Commenters, X-Launchpad-Bug-Private and X-Launchpad-Bug-Security-Vulnerability. (The X-Launchpad-Bug: header actually represents a bug task and may appear multiple times in a single email. Each one contains information about various properties of that bug task, including: distribution, product, distroseries, sourcepackage, component, milestone, status, importance and assignee.) All of these headers provide additional ways to filter e-mail -- they are especially useful if you are subscribed to a lot of bug mail.

See the Launchpad bug email headers page for more detailed information about these headers.

Example filters

Example procmail rules from MartinPitt, tweak to your needs (note that the order matters!):

# I do not want to get my own mails bounced back
:0
* ^X-Launchpad-Bug:
* ^From:.*martin.pitt@ubuntu.com
/dev/null

# ignore bug mail for archive admin, I work with web UI lists
:0
* ^X-Launchpad-Bug:
* ^X-Launchpad-Message-Rationale: Subscriber @ubuntu-archive
/dev/null

# mostly noise from bug status triaging, too much to read
:0
* ^X-Launchpad-Bug:
* ^X-Launchpad-Message-Rationale: Subscriber @ubuntu-qa
/dev/null

# SRUs land in a separate folder, which is read with high prio
:0:
* ^X-Launchpad-Bug:
* ^X-Launchpad-Message-Rationale: Subscriber @ubuntu-sru
usru

# adding me as an explicit subscriber or a another team that I'm part
# of deserves priority and goes to my main ubuntu folder
:0:
* ^X-Launchpad-Bug:
* ^X-Launchpad-Message-Rationale: Subscriber($| @)
ubuntu

# I want to read bugs assigned to me with high prio
:0:
* ^X-Launchpad-Bug:
* ^X-Launchpad-Message-Rationale: Assignee
ubuntu

# everything else into bugs mbox, bulk processed
:0:
* ^X-Launchpad-Bug:
ubugs