Hello Faidon,

First I must say, I am very happy that it is communicated, that is very welcome. It is however not pleasant for the volunteers who have to work with it are given the impression that if it is not under WMF, that somehow it is less important or something...

Please realize, WMF is maintaining the infrastructure not for itself but for the whole Wikimedia movement. For historical and some practical reasons, some parts are maintained/organized by chapters who do that to support the volunteers who all strive to improve the content of the projects. Please try to act like this matter is divided over two separate departments who need to work together here, if that is kept in mind it gives a much better impression and works better I think.

I do not think that it matters if there was given a guarantee or not, that is not the point. The fact that we could use these addresses is because it was set up this way, absolutely not a happy accident. There is also a very good reason to use these e-mail addresses, they look more trustworthy for the public to use.

For me this stuff is totally unknown. I have no idea what is meant. What I do know is that we would like to keep using these addresses for sending and receiving e-mails through the OTRS system.

If I am not mistaken, Siebrand is the person who has set this up or is maintaining it. I do not think he is on this mailinglist.

Romaine

2014-06-22 17:51 GMT+02:00 Faidon Liambotis <faidon@wikimedia.org>:

Maarten,

On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 05:12:22PM +0200, Maarten Dammers wrote:
> >Pointing MX records of *domains* completely unknown to us, to our
> >frontend mailservers, without ever telling us about it, and expecting to
> >find their way inside the infrastructure and reach the OTRS box *is* a
> >hack, and one I'm about to correct :)
> Define "us". All has been documented on the OTRS wiki and setup
> together with the OTRS admins.

Us = the system administrators of the email servers where people pointed
the MX records to. Wikimedia's main mail relays (mchenry & sodium) are
not under the purview of the OTRS admins. (I don't even have access to
the OTRS wiki; nor should I need to).

we never provided any gurantees to anyone that these hostnames will
remain forever the same and will be used as email servers (we knew, in
fact, that the exact opposite holds). Nor did we ever -to my knowledge-
said that it's okay for those systems to be used in this way. The fact
that they happily relayed email to OTRS was a happy accident.

mchenry is about to be decomissioned -- it's one of the last boxes in
Tampa, our old datacenter. The only reason we are discussing this now
instead of mail for these domains being silently broken soon *because we
didn't know about them* is because I noticed these domains entirely by
accident by grepping through our logs.

Now, can we get constructive? Are the people that own and/or manage
these domains on this list?

Thanks,
Faidon

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