We know this will disappoint many of you, but it was not feasible to keep it running anymore with a reasonable quality.
Several factors led to the decision:
Communication has moved on. 25 years ago it was important to provide a consistent way for users to contact CPAN module authors. Today people use rt.cpan.org, forums, and other channels..
Over 99% of mail was spam. Even two layers of spam filtering let some through, hurting deliverability for our other outbound mail.
Modern email requires ARC, DKIM, DMARC, and SPF. Providing these correctly on a forwarding service is hard, so legitimate mail often fails to be delivered.
We approached several email providers, but were unable to find one to host the service.
The number of active users was small compared to the number of CPAN authors. During a recent extended, unannounced outage, we received only two inquiries.
We will work with the cpan-security team so they keep a way to reach authors.
Bounces will soon report that the MX cpan.org-email-is-gone-use-http-rt.cpan.org cannot be found as a breadcrumb pointing toward alternatives.
cpan.org email was one of the first services we ran for the Perl community; over the years we've added others, some for the wider internet. The perl.org mailing lists have been running for 28 years and continue to operate. We also still help run PAUSE and the CPAN archive system. rt.cpan.org remains available, thanks to The Perl Foundation and Request Tracker.
For most of its 25 years, cpan.org email was widely used, and running it was a pleasure. The last seven or eight became mostly spam fights and deliverability work — a big part of why we're stopping now.
Please don't ask us to reconsider. We recognize this change will affect some users more than others. We wrestled with this for a long time and are confident that it is the right call.
Sincerely,
The perl noc volunteers
