Interference between mailing list and GH notifications

[erik.joelsson at oracle.com]

Hello Roman,

The mailinglist bridge in Skara parses the mbox archives on the 
mailinglist server to figure out what emails belong to PR threads, and 
then posts them as comments. It does this by looking at the In-reply-to 
headers, which tie emails together in threads. In this case, Dave must 
have hit "reply" on an existing email in his mail reader and then 
repurposed the email by just changing the subject. Behind the scenes, 
the in-reply-to header is still included and recorded by the mailinglist 
server, and the Skara mailinglist bridge can't reasonably tell that this 
email wasn't intended for PR27. I would also add that using the reply 
function of your mail reader in this way will also confuse threading for 
many email readers, so I would consider it bad practice.

Looking at the raw mbox archive for lilliput-dev for November:

https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/lilliput-dev/2021-November.txt

We can see that Dave's emails has this header:

In-Reply-To: 
<DLW0fMcT0X9o15R8ue-4iS7OL0fJfz0-ONt3g9vkVH0=.74e131b3-1ad2-4486-9153-561249e4390a at github.com>

Looking back through the October archive:

https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/lilliput-dev/2021-October.txt

We can trace this back to this email, which Skara sent on your behalf 
based on a comment in PR27:

https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/lilliput-dev/2021-October/000194.html

/Erik


On 2021-11-08 15:32, Roman Kennke wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> Today I noticed a weird interference between Lilliput mailing list and 
> GH notifications.
>
> It started when Dave Dice posted something to lilliput-dev:
>
> https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/lilliput-dev/2021-November/000196.html 
>
>
> It seems like Skara/GH thought this somehow belongs to Lilliput PR27, 
> and attached the email to its comments:
>
> https://github.com/openjdk/lilliput/pull/27#issuecomment-963500322
>
> Since then, any reply to this original email got copied into PR27, 
> even if I *excluded* all GH email addresses from CC, and only put in 
> lilliput-dev.
>
> Can you please check what is up there? Have I done a mistake in 
> Lilliput configuration somehow? I haven't changed anything recently 
> since initial project set-up, and I've never seen such behaviour before.
>
> Thanks,
> Roman
>