Socorro/Automatic Emails

What

Socorro is going to automatically send an email to every user that sends us his or her email address along with a crash report. The goal is to make a "just-horrible experience less bad". Goals and scope can be found here: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/socorro-email-Q3-2012

Spec

What

Automatically send an email to every user that gives us an email address.

When

An email is sent at last an hour after we receive a crash report containing an email address.

Who

Emails are sent to all users that give us their email address, with exceptions:

• users can unsubscribe and thus not receive emails from us anymore
• only users with a certain product, version or release channel will receive an email (for example, only Firefox users will receive those email at first)
• users that were sent an email recently won't receive another one (recently means in the last day/week, to be determined)

Where

Socorro will take care of:

• getting recent crash reports with an email address
• generating the email content from templates created by admins
• not sending anything to users that were emailed recently
• sending the email to our ESP
• letting admins edit email templates

The ESP will take care of:

• making sure the user receives the email
• allowing the user to unsubscribe from those emails

Implementation

Use a cron job that runs every hour, dependency on reports_clean, take all new reports with an email address. Use ExactTarget's triggered emails to actually send emails.

Database

CREATE TABLE emails (
    email citext not null,
    last_sending timestamp with time zone,
    constraint emails_key primary key ( email )
);

Iterations

Iteration 1

• sending emails
• only sending emails for Firefox crashes
• unit tests

Not shippable.

Iteration 2

• unsubscribe link
• emailing delays
• unit tests

Shippable.

Iteration 3

• configurable restrictions based on product, version, release channel
• email templates
• admin interface to edit email templates
• unit tests

Shippable.

Development notes

• Triggered email with ExactTarget: http://docs.code.exacttarget.com/020_Web_Service_Guide/Triggered_Email_Scenario_Guide_For_Developers