In “normal” mode I agree. Don’t subscribe to 30 mailing lists if you can’t handle the static flow of incoming mail. The stress is on “static flow” here.

> We generally recommend that you not CC yourself to hundreds of bugs as doing so could result in large amounts of bugmail as indicated above.

But we’re talking about an extraordinary situation here. One day lots of email, after that back to normal mode.
So if the amount of bugmail normally can be handled perfectly by the user then I don’t see a reason to say “change your settings that work fine for you because on one day I will bomb you with hundreds of messages, after that day your old settings would work fine again”. I’m actually happy that some people are subscribed to bug reports and communicate in Maemo Bugzilla. I’m afraid of bad side effects and less people being active if I don’t disable bugmail for reorg.

Moving a bug report from A to B might be an interesting piece of information, it’s not interesting anymore if you receive hundreds. However it is not an important piece of information to the reporter or watcher, because it does not change anything about the validity or state of the bug. It’s only important to the assignee. And in reality we don’t have that many real assignees reading Maemo bugmail at all.

If someone is getting a lot of email from Bugzilla and they don’t like it, then they did something wrong (“they bit off more than they could chew”). I sign up for bugmail so that I can track changes. If someone signs up to track more changes than they can handle then they need to rethink their choices.

Instead of disabling mail, I’d suggest a dry run. We did most of this for the last mozilla reorg, but this is a slight improvement:

1. On a clone of Bugzilla, change the mail daemon to have no access to the outside world and have it queue the mail.
2. Perform all the changes
3. Sort outbound mail by email address and count the number of messages to each user.
4. Send one email to each user of this form:

Dear :
We are about to reorganize Bugzilla according to . This will tentatively happen on (this date is subject to change in response to natural disasters such as rock slides [1][2][3]).

We’ve calculated that you would receive approximately messages. You can configure your mail preferences at /userprefs.cgi?tab=email

We generally recommend that you not CC yourself to hundreds of bugs as doing so could result in large amounts of bugmail as indicated above.

Further, we request that you not take ownership of many bugs without fixing them. Instead, it’s generally recommended that you configure a watch list.

[OPTIONAL. PLEASE IMPLEMENT.]
In order to aid you, we’ve added a row to “but not when (overrides above):” in mail prefs for “The bug is not open (RESOLVED/VERIFIED/CLOSED).” For people with default mail settings we’ve checked this for you automatically.
[-]

[OPTIONAL. NOT RECOMMENDED. PLEASE DO NOT INCLUDE. IT TRAINS PEOPLE NOT TO DO THE RIGHT THING.]
If you don’t respond to this message, we’ll temporarily suppress all bugmail to your account before performing the reorganization.
[-]

[1] http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2008/07/bugzilla_reorg_date_and_time.html
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=448604
[3] http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=4041975#p4041975

Note: it’s possible (not very hard) to backup the email prefs table and then use a simple query to set users to defaults (but exclude people, e.g. me!)

Ich hab neulich nachgedacht ueber synthetische Saetze a priori. Angeblich ist “Gott existiert” oder aber auch “Gott existiert nicht” sowas. Kant und mein Professor sind der Meinung sowas soll es geben. Also wenn du mich fragst ist das ein analytischer Satz, denn die Existenz von Gott ist schon im Wort Gott enthalten; ich erinnere hier an den ontologischen Gottesbeweis. Sein ist zwar angeblich kein reales Praedikat, aber da behauptet eben jener Kant 500 Seiten lang was ganz anderes ehe er zu diesem Schluss kommt.
Mir ist halt doch die Existenzphilosophie lieber. Wie auch immer. Schoenen Abend.