[Bug]: emails are not sent after rev tool actions - on own initiative or cinder escalations

[ioanarusiczki]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

What happened?

I tried today some regression testing around dsa because of #16118

1. I first noticed on dev env. that escalated reports to rev tools resolved with Approve/Ignore won't send emails to the reporter.

Examples:
https://reviewers.addons-dev.allizom.org/en-US/reviewers/review-listed/641902
the same is reproducible on stage
https://reviewers.addons.allizom.org/en-US/reviewers/review/2254019

2. Another problem I've encountered on dev is at rejections on own initiative (and also reproducible with abuse reports escalated from cinder)

for this addon https://reviewers.addons-dev.allizom.org/en-US/reviewers/review-listed/641898 the email after rejection with an appeal url was not sent.
I could reproduce this on AMO stage with 2 other different addons
https://reviewers.addons.allizom.org/en-US/reviewers/review-listed/2254020
https://reviewers.addons.allizom.org/en-US/reviewers/review-listed/2254021

Then I repeated testing on dev and had different results for the 2 below

https://reviewers.addons-dev.allizom.org/en-US/reviewers/review-listed/641899
https://reviewers.addons-dev.allizom.org/en-US/reviewers/review-listed/641900
for these, the first emails to developers were sent , then I sent the appeal urls, the versions got flagged in the manual review queue as expected but at the final step -> developer appeal granted with unreject, approve + appeal I didn't get the final email.

3. I continue having different results when disabling /enabling addons on dev vs stage.

On dev it worked as expected

Disabled, enabled from rev tools based on a report ✅
https://reviewers.addons-dev.allizom.org/en-US/reviewers/review-listed/641897
Disabled, enabled from rev tools from own initiative ✅
Disable, enable from cinder✅
https://reviewers.addons-dev.allizom.org/en-US/reviewers/review/641903

On stage I didn't get emails after disabling the add-ons from rev tools, it only worked from Cinder

No email sent when this addon was disabled on own initiative❌
https://reviewers.addons.allizom.org/en-US/reviewers/review-listed/2254022

No email sent when this addon was disabled from rev tools based on a report ❌
https://reviewers.addons.allizom.org/en-US/reviewers/review-listed/2254024

Only the disable-enable scenario from cinder worked as expected ✅
https://reviewers.addons.allizom.org/en-US/reviewers/review/2254023

What did you expect to happen?

very confusing results , checking on last week , I tried an escalation just before the last push (April 16)
https://reviewers.addons.allizom.org/en-US/reviewers/review/2253987 and everything worked as expected.

┆Issue is synchronized with this Jira Task

[diox]

Need to investigate - maybe tied to the policies sync/cleanup we were doing on dev & stage ?

[ioanarusiczki]

What I had time today to check is to make sure that users are added in the force send email admin
I also disabled on stage cinder_policy_review_reasons_enabled and then checked if I get an email after disabling an addon but I didn't see it - also checked the fake emails from admin.

Later edit:
Scenario 2 - also reproducible on stage.
An escalated reporter appeal resolved from rev tools with Deny appeal -> email is sent in this scenario

[eviljeff]

Attempting to replicate on dev:

1. I first noticed on dev env. that escalated reports to rev tools resolved with Approve/Ignore won't send emails to the reporter.

https://reviewers.addons-dev.allizom.org/en-US/reviewers/review-listed/641902

I couldn't replicate - I tried with this same add-on and got a reporter email in FakeEmail (Rec'd: 06 May 2026 11:11:36) - but now I see I used Confirm Approval, which doesn't require a policy selection. This worked. But if I'd used a reviewer tools action that had a policy selection it wouldn't have worked - see the explanation for 2.

2. Another problem I've encountered on dev is at rejections on own initiative (and also reproducible with abuse reports escalated from cinder)

for this addon https://reviewers.addons-dev.allizom.org/en-US/reviewers/review-listed/641898 the email after rejection with an appeal url was not sent.

Confirming this one. Looks like https://mozilla.sentry.io/issues/7436091860/ - from investigating it's because the policies sync from cinder prod to cinder staging ended up (hard) deleting some policies in Cinder, which is not a normal thing. We should do a better job of protecting the reviewer tools from selecting policies that are invalid.

Then I repeated testing on dev and had different results for the 2 below

https://reviewers.addons-dev.allizom.org/en-US/reviewers/review-listed/641899 https://reviewers.addons-dev.allizom.org/en-US/reviewers/review-listed/641900 for these, the first emails to developers were sent , then I sent the appeal urls, the versions got flagged in the manual review queue as expected but at the final step -> developer appeal granted with unreject, approve + appeal I didn't get the final email.

This is https://mozilla.sentry.io/issues/7436091860/ again - the Approve policy that's available in the reviewer tools is now deleted in Cinder, and replaced by another one with a different uuid.

3. I continue having different results when disabling /enabling addons on dev vs stage.

I didn't check all of these, but I'm pretty sure it's the same problem - reviewer tools has policies for selection which don't exist (any longer) in Cinder, so the API calls break.

[eviljeff]

There's a flaw in a our policy sync function - we avoid removing existing CinderPolicy instances if they're "used", to avoid data-loss, but if they're deleted in Cinder then we shouldn't allow them to be selected for new decisions.