Preflight Mass-Checks By Mail

The email address <automc /at/ spamassassin.zones.apache.org> is used to run mass-checks by email.

If a mail arrives from a known good source to that address, containing a text/plain attachment, that attachment is extracted and saved, and the PreflightBuildBot signalled.

When those buildbot slaves run, they'll pick up the rules file, and check it with "spamassassin --lint". If it passes, it's used in the mass-check for that buildbot slave. Results are then made visible immediately through the normal buildbot web UI. They are presented as 'freqs' output (as usual). They are also fed into the RuleQaApp.

Notes

It's got to be an attachment – don't put the rules in the message body, if they're not in a MIME text/plain attachment, they'll be ignored.

Security

Because mail-submitted rules are OK, we have to be a little more careful than normal. For example, plugins are ignored in mail-submitted rules. Nothing is run if --lint fails. In addition, the preflight mass-check script runs with very paranoid ulimits, to trap CPU-load problems, and executes in a chroot jail with an unprivileged UID.

Adding Sources

A committer needs to edit build/automc/automc-by-mail and add the email address to the $ALLOWED_MAIL_PEOPLE regexp.

If you're not a committer, and you'd like to be able to run mass-checks against the preflight corpora, send a mail to the 'dev' list and we'll add your email addr to the ACL.

(history: see RulesProjBuildBot for planning decisions.)