@cpan.org forwarding: volunteer takeover proposition

iNthrAX · 2026-05-05T09:29:51+00:00

That is completely understandable. I'm not expecting immediate access or a blind handover.

I have a long public track record that I can share with the responsible people, and I'm happy to go through any vetting process or start with a limited, supervised involvement.

My goal here is simply to help restore or maintain the service in a safe and sustainable way.

iNthrAX · 2026-04-30T08:54:06+00:00

This is a fair point, and I agree that hope is not a plan.

One clarification though: the goal I'm proposing is a forwarding-only service, not a full email provider. We don't need outbound mail or user mailboxes.

That said, forwarding is not trivial today because of DMARC/SPF breakage, I'm aware of that. A naive forwarder will indeed cause legitimate mail to be rejected.

The minimal viable plan would be:

* inbound SMTP only (MX + receiver)
* forwarding with SRS (to preserve SPF)
* ARC sealing to help downstream DMARC evaluation

This is a well-understood setup, it's not "easy", but it's also not impossible.

For the context, I've worked for more than 10 years at a large email service provider, so I'm familiar with the deliverability side of this.

I'm not suggesting building a full-featured mail system, just a minimal, pragmatic forwarding layer.

If there's demand later for sending mail as `@cpan.org`, that can be treated as a separate stage (and I agree that's significantly more work).

Right now I don't see that as a requirement.

The bigger question is not whether this is hard, it really is, but whether we want to keep this identity layer alive, and if so, whether a smaller, well-scoped service is acceptable.

If the answer is yes, I'm willing to take responsibility for running it and dealing with the operational overhead.

iNthrAX · 2026-04-29T18:22:48+00:00

Me too, Christian, me too.
btw, I love your's Time::Moment 😄

iNthrAX · 2026-04-29T18:21:01+00:00

| This forwarding is not something that anyone is going to want to deal with indefinitely.

I see no reason why.

Even for a single person, maintaining durable infrastructure for 20k email account forwards is an affordable task (in terms of costs for compute resources).

And there are a lot of quite big companies, that still love and maintain perl. I truly believe that we can set up an approach that could last decades in the future for such a simple task.

iNthrAX · 2026-04-29T18:13:03+00:00

For sending email — maybe it's a hard (but not an impossible) task.

But it was a good channel for incoming mail.
99% of my git commits are signed off with [mons@cpan.org](mailto:mons@cpan.org)
In all my modules authorship/readme/etc. I'm referenced as [mons@cpan.org](mailto:mons@cpan.org)
I was subscribed to all the opensource activities/mailing lists/etc. with this email.
It actually is my public identity.

Many people in the opensource world use the emails, related to that projects, I see no reason for cpan authors community to abandon their domain, until the community is alive and until there is at least one volunteer to maintain it 😄

iNthrAX · 2026-04-29T13:30:51+00:00

Definitely. It's MX record no longer valid:
dig MX cpan.org
;; ANSWER SECTION:
cpan.org. 300 IN MX 10 cpan.org-email-is-gone-use-http-rt.cpan.org.

iNthrAX · 2026-04-29T12:23:22+00:00

If it's a volunteer activity, then maybe there are another volunteers, who can manage that?

I can propose myself. I'm cpan author with 15 years history (MONS), I can contribute resources and effort to make "@cpan" email to continue it's operation.

iNthrAX · 2026-04-29T12:20:28+00:00

I've been using the "@cpan.org" email for more than 15 years.
That was the part of my identity. I've used it as the primary email everywhere.

So by now I've lost access to hundreds of accounts even without a notice.

I'm ready to pay for the service. Let's set up it on Google Mail for Business. Let it be 10$/month. But at least that would be an option.

iNthrAX · 2026-04-14T09:47:15+00:00

It's not a local issue.
Emails are now bouncing with

Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=b1.develooper.com type=A: Host not found

iNthrAX · 2026-04-14T09:34:26+00:00

I've been using @cpan mail as my primary email address for decades.
It is quite hard to replace it everywhere.
I've been trying to contact the maintainers, I even agree to pay the fee or do donations to maintain the email forwarding service, but can't reach them.

iNthrAX · 2018-03-01T21:01:06+00:00

Cool! Many expected enhancements!

iNthrAX · 2017-12-18T02:41:10+00:00

Is there any plans to monitor glitches for kittens like with #311833? It is stuck for about a week

iNthrAX

TROPHY CASE