Excuse me but it seems this seems to avoid the actual problem.
Although I know the answer for the most part, the question I think we should be asking is more along the lines of "Why are they using email instead of on-wiki discussion threads?"
I personally don't see a lot of gain in providing mailaliases for users.
@wikipedia.org seems too Wikipeida specific and may indeed look too official. @something.wikipedia.org may not scale either because we also have projects on other hostnames (wiktionary, wikibooks, but also species, commons, meta and other *.wikimedia.org wikis).
Also, when we do find a good hostname to use, I think it should be universal and tied to a SUL username (not per-wiki or per-project), so it shouldn't contain the name of a project (wikipedia, wiktionary, commons, ..) and not the name of the software (mediawiki). Something like "users.wikimedia.org" might be appropriate.
If that is done though, would it be an alias (forward) address or would it allow sending (IMAP/POP3). The latter would probably also cost a significant amount of storage over time, so alias/forward is probably better.
However that means that after you reply, your original e-mailaddress is visible. In which case there is no advantage to using an alias over simply using [[Special:EmailUser]], which is effectively also an alias for the first mail.
-- Krinkle
On Mar 29, 2012, at 9:41 PM, Petr Bena wrote:
Hi,
Lot of volunteers are using email to communicate when they discuss wikimedia related issues. Even if it's not a big problem to use personal email there, lot of people, especially administrators do not want to uncover their personal email. Lot of them even have a special private mail for wikipedia purposes. Although wikimedia has own email server on wikimedia domain, it's being given to paid staff only, so question is if it would be worth of having an email service for volunteers who request it (it should be probably limited to users who match some criteria) or just a forward service which can help us to get our personal email hidden (this would not eat space and would be very cheap). I understand that people from foundation might have concerns that volunteers with wikimedia.org emails could cause some troubles or people might be in thought they are employees, so why not to use some another domain, like wmflabs.org for developers and wikipedia.org for wikipedians for example (other domains for respective projects). What do you think?
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