At some point (and we don't know that date) the Oracle hosting of the *.openoffice.org email forwarder will be shut down. Users of this forwarder will be disappointed when they hear the news. But they will be far more upset if they do not hear about until their emails start disappearing. We didn't create this problem, but we're the best ones to help reduce the pain of this shutdown.
Please note: I don't want to discuss here the merits of shutting down or not shutting down such a forwarding service. That discussion was made moot by an ASF Board decision against hosting such a general-access email forwarding service like the legacy OOo had. I want to discuss how we can best notify users about this change, so they can make necessarily changes on their end, and how we can preserve continuity for some important email addresses on our end. This is my proposal, one that I am willing to work on. I welcome help. And if someone wants to make a counter-proposal that they would rather work on, then feel free. We can discuss. 1) Check with Andrew on the latest date where we can be assured the email forwarder will be still in operation. I don't want users surprised, but neither do I want this to appear open-ended. 2) Write a blog post to notify public of the shutdown. Review on ooo-dev, then publish. Encourage wide reposting of the blog post via social media, legacy mailing lists, etc. "Get the word out" 3) Work on a wiki page that has a list of common destination openoffice.org email addresses as well as the corresponding (or closest matching) AOO address. 4) Work with Infra@ on a custom bounce notification that would be sent in response to all openoffice.org emails. It would link to the wiki page from step #3. Coordinate this so it is ready on or before the forwarder shutdown date. Note: I am not proposing any automatic forwarding. Automatic forwarding would indiscriminately forward spam as well. My goal is to avoid that. But it is a trade-off and there may be special circumstances for specific lists. But I think we can handle 99% of them, along with all of the personal email addresses, per the above. 72 hours, lazy consensus, etc. -Rob
