Maintainers must be reachable by email

[Stephen J. Smoogen]

On 8/30/05, Tom Lane <tgl at redhat.com> wrote:
> 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.


Hmmm, one solution would be to  set up 'vanity' accounts on a server
that people who only want email from the build systems and such. 
However this is higher burden on the fedora systems administration
staff in yet another machine to maintain.

I was going to say that maintainers/contributers need to make sure
that they have some account that is freely available to people to send
email to .. but I hate agreeing with David on things :)


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
CSIRT/Linux System Administrator