Summary

Unlike local blocks, global blocks do not currently have the option to disable sending email. As I understand it, this means that globally blocked users can send emails (on wikis where they are not also locally blocked w/o email).

Stewards often handle cases where a global block is preferable but where we do not want the user sending emails. This is an important feature to match functionality of local blocks.

Background

• Local blocks can optionally disable the ability for a user to use the Special:EmailUser interface
  • This is done in cases where a user abuses this after their block or in cases where the administrator knows that this will be abused (based on previous actions)
• Global blocks do not currently have the ability to disable emails
  • This has been raised by a WMF steward as an issue, because there are often examples where users are abusing email access over multiple wikis and so a global block is what is needed to prevent access fully

User story

As a steward I see:

• A user is abusing by sending emails across multiple wikis
• A steward is asked to prevent this user from sending emails
• They try to globally block the account, but this does not prevent sending emails
• The steward then has to locally block the account on all the wikis where they have been sending emails
• The abusing user just moves to a different wiki to send emails (with 800+ options this could go on for a while)

Specification

TBD

Technical notes

We can reuse the AbstractBlock definitions for a block preventing email access. Ideally this should only be set if the block specifically disables email, as doing this would prevent appeals via emails on the wikis the global block is active on (on WMF wikis all wikis except metawiki)

Acceptance criteria

• It is possible to optionally block sending email using a global block