[patch] Removing email from preferences makes account unusable

[Heikki Toivonen (remove -bugzilla when emailing directly)]

I had just installed Trac with admin user and AccountManager plugin. I then logged in as admin, and changed the admin prefs to have a name and email address. (This actually limited the account since I had not yet set up outgoing email, but there is a separate bug for that.) I then decided I'd make the email field empty in the hopes that the situation would fix itself. Unfortunately doing that caused every page to show KeyError: 'email' while logged in as that user.

The way I recovered was to use trac-admin to create a new admin account, login with that, delete the old admin account, use trac-admin again to recreate the old admin account, set up working email for admin, and finally delete the second admin account.

[anonymous]

I've traced down the exception to lines 543-544 of web_ui.py. The issue seems arise from req.session['email'] being None there (see line 544) I've made following changed these lines to following:

            useremail = req.session.get('email')
            if useremail is None:
                useremail = ''
            chrome.add_notice(req, MessageWrapper(tag.span(
                    'An email has been sent to ', useremail,

Not a perfect fix, as this way it still keeps sending an e-mail every time you access a page until you eventually confirm new e-mail. But at least it lets you to confirm the e-mail and works ok after that.

[anonymous]

I had the same problem. (Trac 0.11.2, TracAccountManager-0.2.1dev). My investigation lead to the attached patch.

[anonymous]

You may want to take a look at #4125, there is another patch that tries to fix this part of code

[Sebastian Krysmanski]

Patch against r5836 and Trac 0.11.4

[Sebastian Krysmanski]

Added a patch against r5836 which also prevents the AccountManagerPlugin from sending an verification email and displaying a warn message if the email adress is empty.

[Michael Renzmann]

(In [7162]) Add patch from manski which prevents the e-mail address verification mail to be sent if the user has not set an e-mail address. Refs #3401

[Michael Renzmann]

(In [7164]) Add patch from manski which prevents the e-mail address verification mail to be sent if the user has not set an e-mail address. Refs #3401

[Michael Renzmann]

With the patch from manski the original issue should be fixed. I've committed the patch to 0.11 and trunk. @pacopablo: I hope you don't mind.

Another thing that should be checked is whether the plugin would try to send e-mails even is no smtp settings are available in trac.ini. I fixed such an issue in another plugin long time ago, but can't remember what plugin it was. Will look into that again.

[Steffen Hoffmann]

Replying to otaku42:

With the patch from manski the original issue should be fixed. I've committed the patch to 0.11 and trunk. @pacopablo: I hope you don't mind.

Good thing, so this ticket is solved. Thank you for the support.

Another thing that should be checked is whether the plugin would try to send e-mails even is no smtp settings are available in trac.ini. I fixed such an issue in another plugin long time ago, but can't remember what plugin it was. Will look into that again.

Certainly this is not as trivial as it sounds. In fact in addition to ​TracNotification there is AnnouncerPlugin, and both have smtp as well as sendmail transport capability plus enable/disable option to shutdown email even if configured, and maybe even more relevant stuff.

Feel free to open a new ticket, if you see issues related to this, since it's far beyond the scope of the original report here.