Untagging Community-Tech since this is a feature request for a closed wish.

How are these emails sent out to begin with? Is there a bot or something that finds eligible accounts (i.e. not bot accounts), then it's supposed to scan the nomail list to exclude those people, before finally sending out emails? Or is it all done manually? The thread at Talk:Wikimedia Foundation nomail list#Bizarre suggests there's no automation as users are reporting they're still receiving emails despite being on this list.

Unless there's deployed software on the WMF cluster that handles the sending of these emails, I'm not sure a preference makes much sense. Preferences are private, for starters. Whatever mechanism sending out the emails would need access to the MediaWiki stack to query which users have the preference (un)set. On top of that, this seemingly would be a very rarely used preference and thus not quite preference-worthy.

Additionally, global preferences are supposed to be overwritable on individual wikis. I'm sure it can be done with some effort, but it's weird to have a global preference with no local preference that can override it (I say this assuming these emails pertain to movement-wide manners and not something specific to individual wikis).

In T316349#8195388, @MusikAnimal wrote:

How are these emails sent out to begin with?

I think they gather a list of eligible voters and then use a maintenance script to send these, after filtering users listed in the Wikimedia nomail list. I'd appear that no scan for bots is done, as I received an email for my bot account, which can't vote. I think @jrbs may know how this is being done nowadays.

Unless there's deployed software on the WMF cluster that handles the sending of these emails, I'm not sure a preference makes much sense.

Maybe that's the way to go. I'd assume this should be some sort of MediaWiki extension where users could opt-in/opt-out of these kind of emails/communications?

Why not use Echo? It’s designed exactly for this purpose – sending notifications. It has built-in support for user opt-out. It provides on-wiki notifications as well, so users who didn’t provide their email address (which is optional!) don’t miss out. And to address the concern of which preferences apply, the to-be-created extension could be installed on Meta and nowhere else, so that naturally Meta preferences apply. (The UI of this extension could remain to be a maintenance script, if the people sending out the mails prefer that.)

In T316349#8336917, @MarcoAurelio wrote:

In T316349#8195388, @MusikAnimal wrote:

How are these emails sent out to begin with?

I think they gather a list of eligible voters and then use a maintenance script to send these, after filtering users listed in the Wikimedia nomail list. I'd appear that no scan for bots is done, as I received an email for my bot account, which can't vote. I think @jrbs may know how this is being done nowadays.

The process is documented here - https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/SecurePoll#Email_spam

In T316349#8550595, @Tacsipacsi wrote:

Why not use Echo?

Comparing SecurePoll's sendMail.php to Echo:

• sendMail.php allows separately authored plain text and HTML emails, whereas Echo just does Sanitizer::stripAllTags() on the HTML
• Echo imposes a particular layout on HTML emails, optimised for short text, with a hard-coded width of 480px for the message content.

It would be like the Newsletter extension, which just sends the summary and a link to the newsletter via Echo, not the whole contents.

Maybe Echo needs a long text feature.

Related:

• T100918: Standardize and document process for mass electronic mailings (Board elections, fundraising, etc.)
• T148783: Make maintenance script for sending annual survey emails

I'm thinking about this in the context of T300265.