Deliver user messages

It is often required to deliver messages to users. But users are registered via a pseudonym, so we do not always have their e-mail address. Other users did not register an e-mail address, or disabled mail delivery.

Techniques

The following techniques exist:

• send external e-mail, but then you need to know the e-mail address
• send internal e-mail, via MediaWiki (Wikimedia username required)
• post a message to the user talk page (Wikimedia username required)

All techniques can be done manually, or automatically (via a Python script).

Procedure

You could start to obtain a list of users for which you have an external e-mail address.

Then you can try to send an internal e-mail. There is a quota of e-mails that you can send per day, so you better sort the list by descending importance. You could try multiple projects. Users are only active on certain projects/languages.

For the rest of the non-delivered e-mail list, and the users who did not register an e-mail address, or disabled e-mail delivery, you can deliver a message to the talk page.

All techniques can be automated via a Python script.

See also

• Pywikibot/Mass user mailing
• Mass mailing procedure