NewAnnounceProcessSeptember2020

As of September 10th 2020, direct emails to the pgsql-announce mailing list are no longer accepted.

There are several reasons for this:

• Reduce the chances that email to the list gets flagged as spam. Many senders on pgsql-announce today are sending from domains that disallow relaying through mailing lists, which also means other emails to the list get hurt because systems “learn” that this happens.
• More clearly differentiate between emails from the PostgreSQL project itself and other announcements.
• Ensure that no tracking pixels and similar entries can be sent to subscribers through the lists.
• Make it possible for subscribers to decide which topics they are interested in receiving email about, through the use of tags.
• Unify the moderation practices between news on www.postgresql.org and pgsql-announce that have sometimes been inconsistent, and posting to both have often led to very different delivery times depending on order of moderation.

Instead of posting directly to the list, posters will be using the system for posting news to www.postgresql.org. Anything posted as news there will automatically be sent as an email to pgsql-announce, and the same set of tags that are used for the website will be used for email delivery.

All emails will be sent from a system address that will handle eventual bounces, but the reply address of the email will be selected by the person sending the announcement from one of the confirmed addresses for the organisation. All organisations that want to post news will have to confirm at least one email address to be used (this is done from the same interface), and can have multiple ones if wanted. Specifically, the From address in the email letter header will be set to noreply-announce@postgresql.org, and the Reply-To header will be set to the selected email address, so a user hitting 'reply' in nearly all mail clients will have the To address populated with the selected email address.

Just like for the website, email content can be written in markdown (and previewed on the site), which will be delivered as a rich text email to the recipients (along with a plain markdown version as well, of course). Emails will be delivered immediately as the news item on the website is approved.

There are sure to be some issues with this system in the beginning, so if you are running into any form of problems or have questions about it, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at webmaster@postgresql.org. If you are uncertain, please do so *before* submitting news for moderation!