multiple authorities respond and ics import help please

[Katherine Szuminska]

Hello

I'm looking for any pointers on two admin issues, first up, I would like to make sure secondary authority's responses are routinely delivered to another authority's request, and guidance on successfully importing public holidays via ics (no one should have to enter these by hand!).

1) When a second authority responds to an information request via the request's email address (in this case the OAIC regarding an extension to the request), does such a response always automatically get stuck in the holding pen? I've been manually checking them as they've come in and they've all used the correct address for each request.

Are there other practices or inclusions I could request authorities follow that would serve as clues so that such responses would be automatically assigned in future?

2) Is there a trick to importing ics calendars for public holidays? We've no equivalent to the gov.uk ics for all Australian public holidays, so I've tried to bring in the apple public holidays ics for Australia from https://calendars.icloud.com/holidays/au_en-au.ics and it fails returning the following not very illuminating error message:

"Sorry, there was a problem processing this page

You have found a bug. Please contact us to tell us about the problem"

Sadly I am the person the 'contact us' form would send my message to and I use the admin interface but not the back end. I didn't see any issues open on this upstream, except a complaint about those that double up in the UK importing multiple calendars (one Christmas day is enough for anyone) so here I am. Can you help?

Happy almost Solstice! 🌞

Kat

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Katherine Szuminska

OpenAustralia Foundation

openaustralia | planningalerts | righttoknow | theyvoteforyou | morph

[Gareth Rees]

Hey Kat, great to hear from you!

> When a second authority responds to an information request via the request's email address… does such a response always automatically get stuck in the holding pen? I've been manually checking them as they've come in and they've all used the correct address for each request.

This shouldn't happen in "normal" operation – the response should go through to the request. Each request will have values for "Allow new responses from" and "Handle rejected responses". 

"Allow new responses from" can be "anybody", "authority_only" or "nobody".

"Handle rejected responses" can be "bounce", "holding pen" or "blackhole".

By default requests are set to "anybody" / "holding_pen".

The situation you're describing makes me think that the requests might be "authority_only" / "holding_pen". This would mean that only emails sent from the domain matching the authority's request_email address domain would get through to the request; other senders' mail would get sent to the holding pen.

Over time "Allow new responses from" gets changed from anybody -> authority_only, and then authority_only -> nobody, as an automated spam prevention mechanism. You can tune the timings for this behaviour in the configuration https://alaveteli.org/docs/customising/config/#restrict_new_responses_on_old_requests_after_months.

When you see more of these, I'd check those two values on the related request.

> Is there a trick to importing ics calendars for public holidays? …it fails returning the following not very illuminating error message: "Sorry, there was a problem processing this page

This page should correspond to an error message sent to https://alaveteli.org/docs/customising/config/#exception_notifications_to. You'll also be able to see the errors (also known as "exceptions") in the application log file. I'm not sure I have any suggestions without knowing the technical details here.

Have a lovely Christmas! 🎄

Best,

Gareth