Or perhaps, if for some reason $wgPasswordSender is going to be used merely for sending passwords, a new global variable should be defined and used for such non-urgent emails.

There are no emergency emails. $wgEmergencyContact was originally displayed via the web when there was a database connection error. The user was instructed to send an email to that address to inform the administrator of the problem. This message has now been removed. When email notification was implemented, Tom found $wgEmergencyContact to be a convenient source of a site administrator email address.

I'd recommend a couple of things:

1. Use $wgPasswordSender consistently for 'auto-generated emails to folks'. This would be relatively likely to be a 'do-not-reply' type of address which doesn't reach any human.

2. Perhaps, give the option to mail $wgEmergencyContact (eg, automatically) on various types of errors or alerts.

• Bug 14999 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Applied on trunk in r38374, on 1.13 in r38375:

• (bug 13376) Use $wgPasswordSender, not $wgEmergencyContact, as return address for page update notification mails.

Note that $wgEmergencyContact is now not currently in active use, but could
in theory be used for some kinds of failure notifications or to provide to
users to contact in case of failure, which I think was its original intention.
Certainly it's silly to throw an "emergency" contact on auto-sent mails!

There's also a $wgNoReplyAddress, which is currently used to add a Reply-To
header on notification mails. WTF? :)

We should probably refactor all this address crap...