Re: Brandon Williams's E-Mail bouncing

From: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Date: Sep 17, 2018, 18:04 UTC
Message-ID: <CAGZ79ka4hQYHRc-=LkGFbFmzhJfj8+nOTUB41PnajySXeLuCFw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <87zhwgj9mc.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>

On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 10:51 AM Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

>
> Aside from that particular address bouncing [...] it would be nice if git
> {format-patch,send-email,check-contacts} & the .mailmap format would
> support and understand some way to map addresses to
> e.g. noreply@example.com, and prune them out appropriately. We have a
> lot of addresses from past authors which bounce, and where no current
> contact address is known.

Tombstones, eh?

For send-email I would very much prefer the proactive warning instead of silently dropping that email address as I would want to know, so I can try to follow up somehow and deal with it as-is.

I think the main purpose of the mail map file until now was to consolidate multiple identities into one (e.g. misspellings or capitalisation issues in names, different email addresses for all the same person), now you want to extend it to also contain more information about an author-ident, such as emails being active? Or recording if someone is not interested in the project anymore? I think recording that an email bouncesl is just duplicating information that can be easily checked. Recording that a particular contributor doesn't have time/interest any more is slightly different, but IMHO the mail map file is also not very well suited for that endeavor.

Oh, the above paragraph is written with git - the tool - in mind, not the git.git repository where we can (ab)use our own tooling. ;-)

So mapping all bouncing emails to no-reply@example.com would map them to the same author ident, which we would not want. (e.g. we'd still want to know how many different people contributed so far, hence keep them separate). We'd need to have unique email addresses that still explain their intent, i.e. <user>+no-reply@example.org would work?

Thanks, Stefan