yournextrepresentative
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mysociety
send a notification email to an address when it's added to the site
This is slightly modified suggestion from a user who was upset to discover someone had added their personal email address to the site, and they didn't know that this had happened. Their original suggestion was, I think, that the email address should only be added once there had been a confirmation in response to an email to that address. Unfortunately, I think that exact mechanic (opt-in) would really hit the number of email addresses we add to the site, and the problematic cases like this have been (so far) rare, thankfully.
As an alternative, that goes some way to helping users in that situations, when someone first introduces a new email address to the site, we should consider sending an email to that address saying something like:
Your email address has just been added to YourNextMP (a free [etc.] candidate database) as a contact for the candidate Joe Bloggs. This is a one-off email to check that this is correct - please let us know if it's not, or if you have a different email address that should be used.
It would also be helpful if you could add more details about yourself to the site to help your prospective constituents learn more about you and your policies. You can edit it yourself by following this link and creating an account.
The risk of doing this would be that it could be used to annoy people by adding their addresses to the site which would cause them to get emails (not quite spam, since you wouldn't be able to sell anything via it, or add custom content) - hopefully we'll soon be reducing that risk with the edit queue for new users' contributions.
I think this is an important change to introduce - as an update to my previous comment I don't think anyone's done any work on an edit queue for new users' contributions, so I think we should go ahead and add the "your email address has just been added" notifications without that.
I think this is a sterling idea. (I also think your Github writing — particularly your opening post on this issue is excellent, Mark!)
Looking at headers I think emails are sent directly from AWS instances.
I agree we shouldn't make it an opt-in email, and would go further to suggest we should be careful not to alarm candidates into removing email addresses (which I suspect a user could easily re-add as we've no way to preemptively lock or block specific fields or updates).
This message is to notify you that this email address has just been added to the Democracy Club candidate database, for Joe Bloggs[optional, once election names are more human-friendly: who is listed as standing in the xyz election]. You or a colleague are welcome to edit or add to the information we store by visiting: [URL] We are especially interested to publish each candidate's "Statement to Voters" so please add one if you can. If you encounter any problems please reply to this email and we'll do our best to help.
