[wp-meta] [Making WordPress.org] #6920: Detect invalid plugin committer email addresses prior to sending bulk emails

[Making WordPress.org]

#6920: Detect invalid plugin committer email addresses prior to sending bulk
emails
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 Reporter:  dd32              |      Owner:  (none)
     Type:  defect (bug)      |     Status:  new
 Priority:  low               |  Milestone:
Component:  Plugin Directory  |   Keywords:
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 The Plugins team send out an email just before every WordPress release
 along the lines of "WordPress 6.2 is imminent! Are your plugins ready?",
 this email goes out to every current plugin committer.

 The result of that email is a LOT of bounced emails, usually this is from
 people leaving a company or having a domain expire and having never closed
 their WordPress.org account or been removed as a committer of a plugin.

 The bounce notification emails then go to the plugin directory helpscout
 instance, which quickly fills up with hundreds of emails that need to be
 mostly manually processed.

 To combat this, it would be good to be able to validate existing committer
 email addresses ''prior'' to sending emails out, and when the plugin
 doesn't have any other committers, close the plugin automatically.

 Validating email addresses is not a perfect science, it's easy to validate
 some aspects of it (Domain is valid, Domain has MX record), a little
 harder for others (Verify that the email server listed will accept email
 for the account), and downright impossible to detect some others (Email
 address is a forwarder, which forwards to a non-existent mailbox).

 A Google for 'Email validation checker' will return a multitude of online
 services which can do this.
 We should consider either using such a service, or running some of the
 simpler checks directly to reduce the number of emails we ultimately send,
 reducing the amount of emails that the plugins team needs to manually
 process.

 This will also ensure that when we ''need'' to contact a plugin author for
 some reason, we actually have a method of communication.

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Ticket URL: <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6920>
Making WordPress.org <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/>
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