As part of setting up the new CPAN Testers Preferences website, I've been going through my mail-daemon files to look at the bounce backs to the daily summary reports. I wasn't surprised that some PAUSEIDs no longer had a corresponding destination mailbox, such as FOTANGO, but I was surprised to see as many as 115 of them bouncing back with no known mailbox type errors.
Now at least one of those mailboxes is for someone I know, so I'll be prompting them to check their PAUSE settings, but I would urge anyone who moves email address (either due to a job change or a change of ISP or vanity domain), to make sure that you update your PAUSE settings.
Although I can appreciate CPAN Testers daily summaries might not be that important, your end users might find it really annoying if they're trying to get in touch with you to find out something about your distribution(s), then get a 'user unknown at that address' type of response.
In the past it has been frustrating for those wishing to fix broken modules, or want to take over maintainership, as it means a lot of effort is wasted trying to track down the author. The PAUSE Admins now have procedures to deal with this, but it would be so much easier to be able to contact author by their PAUSE address in the first place.
So if you have a PAUSE account, please check it every so often just to make sure the PAUSE Admins have the right address for you. You can hide it from the likes of Search CPAN and CPAN Testers, so long as the PAUSEID@cpan.org eventually goes to a valid mailbox.
In future for all those addresses that do get bounce backs, I shall be disabling the sending of summary reports. This will also apply to the individual reports once that piece of the puzzle is in place. After that you will need to login to the Preferences (coming real soon now) website and change your preferences to re-enable the report sending.
In the past it has been frustrating for those wishing to fix broken modules, or want to take over maintainership, as it means a lot of effort is wasted trying to track down the author. The PAUSE Admins now have procedures to deal with this, but it would be so much easier to be able to contact author by their PAUSE address in the first place.
In future for all those addresses that do get bounce backs, I shall be disabling the sending of summary reports.
Given that CPANTESTERS has the side effect of determining which PAUSE addresses appear now to be invalid, would it be worth feeding that information back into the PAUSE database? In my opinion, having PAUSE, and tools such as search.cpan.org, show that an author is believed to be unreachable would have two benefits:
Re:Notable lights out?
barbie on 2008-11-10T17:24:40
It's not necessarily that the author is uncontactable, but that the most obvious way to contact them, isn't set up.
From my list, there were 32 PAUSE@cpan.org addresses that have email forwarding set up, which failed due to the forward address no longer existing. These are worth reporting perhaps, as in at least one case I know the author has moved jobs.
However, the vast majority of rejections were due to the PAUSE@cpan.org address not having a valid forwarding address setup. In the author's PAUSE account you can specify an email address to be displayed in your Search CPAN page, but it appears that it is not automatically setup for email forwarding. I'm guessing that those authors are unaware that their PAUSE@cpan.org address is not activated for email forwarding by default.
As to solutions for this, perhaps email forwarding should be enabled by default, thus forcing the author to disable it if they really don't want to be contacted that way, or some form of on screen warning when the use the form that emphasises that they need to enable email forwarding, or maybe some other alerting.
Publishing a list somewhere, might alert some authors, but not choosing a decent module, simply because the author is on that list is not necessarily good idea, and would be an argument for not publishing the list IMO.
