openSUSE admin

As you may know, every single Email to admin@opensuse.org is forwarded into our ticket system at https://progress.opensuse.org/. As this Email is meanwhile widely known in the public Internet, we see a lot of Spam in our ticket system. So far, we mainly ignored that stuff and simply deleted the Email/Ticket.

But our ticket system is not really planned to become a ticket system: we run Redmine, which originally is intended to be a project management software. The ability to create issues (or tickets, as we call them) in the system by sending an Email was not really intended in the beginning. So the ability to detect and mark Spam Emails as such simply does not exist. Even worse: every Email results in a user, that get's created automatically, to allow us to send out an Email to this person as answer to his ticket.

All of this is not really problematic: you learn to deal with it. But with over 14,000 "users" in the database (and over 17,000 real tickets), the system started to become slow. So we invested a bit of our time and looked into the user list. Good for us: most of the Spammers seen to have special days to submit their stuff. And even more interesting: they do it at the same time from multiple accounts!

So we ended up in setting huge user blocks to "locked", which will not allow them to use the same Email account again to send their Spam to us - and on the other side this fastens up our database, as most queries only search for "active" users (which is the default). Maybe we can use the gathered Email addresses to feed a Spam filter - later, once we have one.

As good and simple as this message is: there is a small potential that we might have blocked/locked some real user accounts in our Redmine instance with this simple workaround. We tried our best and already excluded a lot of domains we trust (like '@opensuse.org') in the query. But we can not guarantee that we did not block your account at the moment, as there are simply too many (to us) unknown openSUSE users. And we want to spend more time on fixing your tickets than on finding out if one of the 10,000 now locked accounts is a false positive.

If you are locked out of https://progress.opensuse.org/ (and ONLY on this system/URL), please get in touch with us.