plugin_thold
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Cacti
Cacti mail notifications - generate one mail with BCC instead of tons of mail with one mail in "TO"
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe
Cacti now sends mail notifications for users in one mail per user. This generates much work for cacti and mail server.
Describe the solution you'd like
Cacti should send one mail with all needed user mails in BCC field.
Additional context
For example: if 40 devices are down and we have in average 10 users to notify for every device there is 400 mails to send instead of 40. Many times on server there are inbound limiters - so in result we get marked as spam in result or the mails are hold in mail spam gateway by policyd service for quarantaine.
There is a split here between the core and the monitor/thold plugins. One way that I've got around this with customers is simply to use a mailing group. When it comes to customer tholds, they have their own list and I even wrong a tholdlist plugin to allow updating notification lists.
At the end of the day, there has does not need to be a TO recipient for email to be delivered, but some anti-spam software can view that as someone trying to be naughty. This means, that for the best method, there would still need to be a TO with a bunch of BCC's as well, so using a mailing group just makes that easier.
@TheWitness and @cigamit may want to through their thoughts on this.
@netniV if You go problems with that - You can use TO with devnull@ or no-reply@ or simply add this source address to ignore list in spam scoring at local gateway (but not ommit limiting and not generate such amount of mails in: communication cacti<->mail gateway whitch generates most problems.
Moving administration of notification list to mail server (by managing mail list subscriptions) is not perfect solution for all because in some instances there are comercial mail servers like gmail whitch doesn't allow in easy way to do that (no mail group function).
So the perfect solution would be to generate one mail with no-replay@ in "TO:" field and all the other mails in "BCC" in header?
I agree, I prefer things that way myself. And there is a disconnect between Email Admins and Cacti Admins sometimes in larger organisations.
I actually prefer that everyone be in the TO on the same email (or use a mailing list). That way I can reply to the email and have a chat with all the other people that may be alerted by it.
Distribution lists solve this issue.
True but add another requirement - possing mail-group-server software.
I think there is a mixture of terminology going on. By distribution groups/lists, we are referring to those groups you would setup internally once.
We aren't necessarily talking about list server software, though you could make use of that. For example, a cheap and cheerful list server type group can actually be done on PostFix with only a little configuration.
However, I do appreciate that if you are sending this to a large number of clients as an alert, that's a lot of emails that go out, though even with a BCC, that would still be the case from the mail server onwards.
We may have some discussion on this, but at the moment, I can't see us focusing our limited development time on it as what is there does work. If you have someone who can produce a pull request for it, we'd be happy to review it.
I suggest we move this to the thold issue tracker since thold is the elephant in the room. We have supported using bcc for some time, but it'll be upto thold to leverage it. The monitor plugin does do some mailing too. We can address that as a feature request there.
How about a minor update to the notification list to have 'To' Emails and 'BCC' Emails?
Develop is under heavy changes. Test away, but avoid the Notification Queue until I get to releasing the alpha. Knocked out 36 issues in two days.