Missing In Action
For some time now I have been promising to publish the list of CPAN Authors who for one reason or another, appear to be uncontactable. These are authors, who when using their PAUSEID @ cpan.org address, generates a rejection of some form. Typically this appears to be for addresses which are set up to be used in redirection, which have since been made obsolete (perhaps from changing jobs or personal domain), but there are a few that are just not setup to receive emails.
I have now created a Missing In Action page, which I will keep updated as I receive bounce backs from the CPAN Testers daily summaries. In some cases bounce backs require verification from a real person, and I do eventually get round to those, but the ones listed are specifically for emails that are outright rejected. If you have not been receiving any CPAN Testers summaries or reports and have been expecting some, please first check this list to ensure that you haven't had your preferences disabled.
If you are on the list, please read the instruction on the page, to learn how to enable your PAUSE email, and to get your CPAN Tester preferences re-enabled.
Cross-posted from the CPAN Testers Blog.
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Some of these definitely have active E-Mails, it just looks like they've rejected mass-mailings from cpantesters.
I have a list of all CPAN author addresses that are no good. We put it together after the spring cleaning mass mailing. It's really a small number.
However, I'm not going to make it public. If you want to use it for something that you don't make public, I'll send it to you.
@Ævar: these aren't mass-mailings, it will be a single email a day at most. In these cases they were sent a couple of emails (though usually just one) before being deactivated.
@brian: the list is to try and make some authors aware that they may need to update their settings via the PAUSE web site. I'd be interested in highlighting the PAUSEIDs (not the email addresses), as the authors themselves may not be aware that they are affected.
Prior to this page, I've previously contacted people I knew, who hadn't noticed that their addresses were incorrect or had inadvertently disabled redirects, and have already received an email from someone today having read my post.
The spring clean emails and pages like this will hopefully encourage those who are less frequent contributors to still stay active within the Perl community.
I like the CPAN Testers service, but 1 E-Mail a day from an automated system is mass-mailing. They're also sent out automatically (i.e. it's opt-out, not opt-in), so I can see why some would block it on the SMTP level. Which makes these statistics somewhat unreliable.
Even so, the Reason line for most of these indicates that the user really doesn't exist at the respective mail hosts. So false positive ratio probably isn't all that bad.