this would give anons a way to determine if a mail address is stored for a given
user. Not sure how much of a risk that would be though.

ayg wrote:

It's already possible to guess based on what the response is to
Special:Emailuser. Of course, they could have always disabled e-mail from other
users, which isn't a possibility here, but the additional information that would
be given for this isn't sufficient to justify the confusion this aims to fix.

Anons can't use Special:Emailuser. But I also don't see how exposing this info
would be a lot of trouble. I'd like to get some more input on that though - the
current "confusing" behavior feels intentional.

ayg wrote:

Anyone who signs up can use Special:Emailuser (provided they give a valid e-mail
address, and why not, it's secret). It should at least say "if that user has
entered a valid e-mail address".

ayg wrote:

Proposed patch

It *looks* like brion broke this in r8618. He changed
SpecialUserlogin::mailPasswordInternal to return WikiError on failure, but it
continued to return a string if there was no e-mail provided. Therefore, the
else statement failed to do its job correctly.

Since WikiError.php starts with "Since PHP4 doesn't have exceptions", I'm
guessing it's probably deprecated in favor of MWException, but on inspection it
appears that multiple functions that could be called from all sorts of places
would have to be modified and retested, so I've just had it return a WikiError.
Tested and works correctly on my install.

Attached:

Applied on r16101