Add option to send HTML mail messages

[tomek.piatek@…]

It would be nice if Trac was able to send notification emails in some sort of rich format, for example HTML. This way one would not have to use fixed fonts in the mail client.

[anonymous]

Ideally the notification message would look exactly the same as the ticket page. At the moment if I use wiki markup in the ticket comment I get raw markup in the notification message.

[Peter Bruin]

I agree that ideally the email would look something like the ticket page. This is especially usefull for my case where we have non software developers fill in tickets. They always complain that the get some funny looking emails. I use Thunderbird and the mails look ok but when I use Outlook the get all distorted. Sending in HTML will solve this setting related issue, sending it looking like the ticket page is the icing on the cake.

[eblot]

peter: have you tried the latest trunk [2799]+ to check if it improves the ticket rendering in Outlook (have a look at the TracNotification page for the options).

[ander.tenno@…]

Add my vote to the people who would like to see notification emails in rich text format. Any plans for this?

[Russell Hind <rhind@…>]

I'm not too worried about html format, but we're now forced to use Outlook 2003 at work, and it wraps the e-mail message very early (i.e. the lines of '-' above and below the summary are wrapped from about 3/4 of the way along which looks fairly message.

Is there another way to stop outlook wrapping like this? That way I'd be quite happy with the plain test messages.

Cheers

Russell

[ander.tenno@…]

Text messages start to be a problem when Wiki is used. Then you do get very funny looking emails.

[lewis.francis@…]

Add my voice to the chorus -- requiring my users to force a monospace font is not going to go over very well.

[oscarmv@…]

Add another vote. Plus an option to send attachments in the notification e-mail when they are added to the ticket (should I file another ticket for that?)

[Willem Kokke <mail@…>]

Definately interested in this one (got here by searching for the option)

I use it alot to send C++ code snippets around, and it looks just unreadable in email.

[benjamin.azan@…]

This improvement would be extremly usefull.

[eblot]

See also #4516

[cboos]

+ this should also be a user preference.

[diego.gentoo@…]

Any news?

[eblot]

Replying to diego.gentoo@gmail.com:

Any news?

Since yesterday and the discussion you initiated?
​http://groups.google.com/group/trac-users/browse_thread/thread/50b20a8fdc262769

[anonymous]

+ 10 more votes from me and my team. I didn't use trac for a long time because of silly unprofessional things like this (and the insistance on SQLite and the installation hastles of the templating engine). It's getting better and better but just needs a bit of polishing around the edges. Trac already has the processing engine to convert wiki markup to HTML, why not just reuse that in generating notification emails?

[eblot]

Replying to anonymous:

+ 10 more votes from me and my team. I didn't use trac for a long time because of silly unprofessional things like this (and the insistance on SQLite and the installation hastles of the templating engine). It's getting better and better but just needs a bit of polishing around the edges. Trac already has the processing engine to convert wiki markup to HTML, why not just reuse that in generating notification emails?

It will be done, hopefully for 0.12. It's not as "simple" as it may look, dealing with multipart emails that work properly with all (major) email clients is not straightforward.

I won't comment on the "silly unprofesionnal" things as it would be off-topic and useless.

[Nicolas Marchildon <nicolas@…>]

I came here because I wanted to have clickable links to tickets referenced in wiki format. Examples:

• Ticket #123
• Change [123]

Therefore, I'm putting my vote on this.

[PP Edenburg]

Yes, I like the feature to be able to send more formatted emails as well. You got my vote!

[Kamil Kisiel <kamil@…>]

Another vote for this feature. This would greatly improve the usability of ticket emails.

As it stands, seeing a bunch of wiki markup in your email message is often a bit... well.. horrible.. especially if it is complicated.

[diroussel+trac@…]

We don't need votes, we need working code. If you'd like this feature please have a go at implementing it and submit your patches here. Please mention which email clients you have tested with.

Ideally it should work with Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail Gmail and others. But that can be hard to achieve.

Useful links:

• ​http://www.email-standards.org/
• ​Recipe 473810: Send an HTML email with embedded image and plain text alternate

[dbytesguard-trackhacks@…]

Has anyone tried the ​AnnouncerPlugin? It is a bit of a hack but it works for me with Outlook 2003. It uses Genshi to create the html and sends a text alternative... also gened by Genshi... sadly it pretty much re-implements the whole trac notification system. It would be nice if Trac supported all this.

[trac-html-notification@…]

I've written a little tutorial in order to recieve HTML email notification with Trac 0.11. It's perfectible but it does the trick until an official support ! You can find it on ​http://trac-html-notification.alwaysdata.net

regards,

Akarzim

[anonymous]

Replying to trac-html-notification@…:

I've written a little tutorial in order to recieve HTML email notification with Trac 0.11. It's perfectible but it does the trick until an official support ! You can find it on ​http://trac-html-notification.alwaysdata.net

regards,

Akarzim

Can you send me your notification.py and ticket_notification_email.txt files for me ?
I can't patch successfully in my trac.

[Ryan Ollos <ryano@…>]

I have been told that the plan is to merge the ​th:AnnouncerPlugin into Trac in 0.13. I'm not sure if this plan is documented anywhere. Perhaps someone knowledgeable on the plan can elaborate.

[rcorsaro]

The plan is to come up with a plan. We've started on TracDev/Proposals/Announcer. I think there is still a fair amount of work to be done.

[the3illings@…]

Are there any plan to get that running in a 0.12.x or 0.13?

[cboos]

Sorry, no. This feature is on the long term plan.

[kofal002@…]

Definitely a desired feature; if anything, at least allow a sane way to change the notification's Content-Type. This incredibly simple option took me several hours investigating & patching files instead of just writing a line to trac.ini. Ridiculous.

Relevant resource (from freakin' 2007):
​http://rickosborne.org/blog/2007/06/getting-trac-to-send-out-html-emails/

[Benjamin Saberin <ben@…>]

Lots of solutions on this page. I'll add mine here. My goal was to modify the original PY scripts as little as possible.

Modified 'pyshared/trac/notification.py'

Original:

 386     msg = MIMEText(body, 'html')

New:

 386     msg = MIMEText(body, 'text')

Modified 'pyshared/trac/ticket/notification.py'

Added:

 306    hdrs['Content-Type'] = 'text/html; charset=utf-8'
 307    hdrs['PreferredFormat'] = 'text/html'

I copied ticket_notify_email.txt to my custom templates folder (set in trac.ini). My first draft, before all my awesome html formatting, works by adding this to the top of the file:

 001    <html><body><pre>

and this to the bottom of the file:

 020    </pre></body><html>

In my final template, I only left the <pre> wrapper around the $ticket_props part of the template. Everything else received html tags with styling.

I'm considering adding format_props_html. But the <pre> forces a fixed-width font, which solves my issue for now.

Hope this helps someone.

[Benjamin Saberin <ben@…>]

My "Original" and "New" modifications for "Modified 'pyshared/trac/notification.py'" lines are inverted.

Replying to Benjamin Saberin <ben@…>:

Lots of solutions on this page. I'll add mine here. My goal was to modify the original PY scripts as little as possible.

Modified 'pyshared/trac/notification.py'

Original:

 386     msg = MIMEText(body, 'html')

New:

 386     msg = MIMEText(body, 'text')

Modified 'pyshared/trac/ticket/notification.py'

Added:

 306    hdrs['Content-Type'] = 'text/html; charset=utf-8'
 307    hdrs['PreferredFormat'] = 'text/html'

I copied ticket_notify_email.txt to my custom templates folder (set in trac.ini). My first draft, before all my awesome html formatting, works by adding this to the top of the file:

 001    <html><body><pre>

and this to the bottom of the file:

 020    </pre></body><html>

In my final template, I only left the <pre> wrapper around the $ticket_props part of the template. Everything else received html tags with styling.

I'm considering adding format_props_html. But the <pre> forces a fixed-width font, which solves my issue for now.

Hope this helps someone.

[ivan@…]

Replying to Benjamin Saberin <ben@…>:

Lots of solutions on this page. I'll add mine here. My goal was to modify the original PY scripts as little as possible.

Hello,

I changed everything that you wrote down and I have customnotification with added html tags (bold, font style and ect..) BUT still in recieved mail header I have "plain text". Do I have to made new pyc and pyo files from existing (modified)? I have trac 0.12 and pyton 2.4.

Thank you.

[anonymous]

Replying to ivan@…:

I changed everything that you wrote down and I have customnotification with added html tags (bold, font style and ect..) BUT still in recieved mail header I have "plain text". Do I have to made new pyc and pyo files from existing (modified)? I have trac 0.12 and pyton 2.4.

Anywhere the phrase

hdrs['Content-Type']

Appears you need to change it from plain text to 'text/html; charset=utf-8', so you can just grep the source code for the above phrase. In comment 45 I linked a ​guide to modifying the source code which is still relevant.