The datatracker should honor "active" or not email everywhere.

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
backend

Research direction

Start by auditing every code path that sends email, including paths that accept bare addresses from outside sources, and trace how recipient activity is checked. Done means inactive known addresses are replaced with an appropriate active address or not pursued when context requires, consistently across all sending paths.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

accepted component: Datatracker: Email sending enhancement

Right now, the codebase is not consistent in checking the "active" bit when sending email.

Instead, anytime the datatracker sends mail, it should look to see if any address it's about to send to is known to be non-active and use a better address for the person instead. Pay attention to context - there may be cases where the right thing to do is not pursue the address further instead of looking for a better one.

Note that some parts of the code take bare addresses from outside sources and send mail to them (such as when submitting drafts). Those should be amended to look to see if the addresses are known and active.

Aggregated with agent assistance on 2026-08-18

Dominant language
Python
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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