RT spams TPA with bounces

Since I fixed the root aliases everywhere, we seem to be getting spam mail bounced back to the tpa alias, from the root@rude email account.

It seems that this mail was previously being delivered locally to the nobody mailbox, which is now a whopping 630MB:

root@rude:/var/mail# ls -al /var/mail/*
-rw-rw---- 1 amavis        mail      5688 May  4  2016 /var/mail/amavis
-rw-rw---- 1 nobody        mail 660486247 Feb 12 21:46 /var/mail/nobody
-rw-rw---- 1 rtmailarchive mail     28174 Sep  1  2016 /var/mail/rtmailarchive

Since legacy/trac#32283 (moved) was deployed, that has stopped growing but instead we're all getting spammed with that junk, which isn't much of an improvement. But at least those problems will have to get fixed.

The first problem is messages in the form:

From: rt@rt.torproject.org Subject: Failed attempt to create a ticket by email, from

attempted to create a ticket via email in the queue help-es; you might need to grant 'Everyone' the CreateTicket right.

We got 23 such emails since the alias was fixed, and this will probably just keep going forever.

I reported this as a bug in the upstream forum, in:

https://forum.bestpractical.com/t/rt-4-4-too-noisy-with-denied-users/34749

I also filed this as a bug in Debian:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=951272

and filed a patch in:

https://github.com/bestpractical/rt/pull/291

That latter patch is directly applied on rude right now, with:

wget -O ~anarcat/PR-291-no-err-on-deny.patch https://patch-diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/bestpractical/rt/pull/291.patch
cd /usr/share/request-tracker4
patch -p1 < ~anarcat/PR-291-no-err-on-deny.patch
service apache2 restart

just skip the t/ chunk.

I'll wait and see what feedback I get from upstream and Debian before deciding what to do with this in the long term. Options include:

1. blocking users at the MTA level - requires TPA operation which we'd like to avoid, we want to train RT admins to be autonomous
2. patch the bug in Debian and follow that process to get rude updated in the long term
3. hotfix the Debian package in our archive

we also need to decide what to do about that 600M mail archive... i'll probably just delete it once i'm happy with our solution.