Maintainers must be reachable by email

[Tom Lane]

Warren Togami <wtogami at redhat.com> writes:
> Michael Schwendt wrote:
>> A fellow Fedora Extras contributor sends a private mail, probably to be
>> treated confidentially, to another contributor. But the mail is rejected
>> automatically due to rigorous or misconfigured SPAM filtering, IP
>> blacklists or SPF problems. ...

> If such a contributor is using CVS and is otherwise uncontactable, we 
> could easily get their attention by disabling their CVS access 
> temporarily.  Such contributors are not very communicative and thus 
> would not see this note.

I think you are oversimplifying this greatly.  There are lots of people,
me for instance, for whom the choice is either "spam filtering with
teeth" or "abandon email, because you will never manage to find the
real mail among the spam".  I routinely reject several thousand junk
messages per day using a combination of SMTP and procmail filtering.
I really don't have a choice whether to filter (and I already spend
much more time than I could wish tuning and maintaining the filters).

This discussion seems to be headed in a direction fairly close to
forbidding contributors from using spam filtering.  That's not a recipe
for improving communication; that's a recipe for losing contributors.

I don't have a better solution I'm afraid, but I wonder whether this
problem isn't being overblown.  As long as you can contact someone via
the mailing lists, you don't have a serious communication problem.
Requiring contributors to keep an eye on certain specified lists
doesn't seem unreasonable.

			regards, tom lane