Add a holiday/vacation mode to temporarily turn off email sending

[Paul Sladen]

When a developer goes on holiday it would be useful to have a "Holiday mode" and turns off email-sending to that user's email addresses and allows them not to have a flooded inbox on return.

This mode could also display "(Holiday)" or a less intrusive icon after the user's name to show that they aren't around and able to respond.

This mode should probably still allow through admin emails from launchpad.

Another use-case for this is to allow users to go dormant for a period of time but without losing all the meta-data and subscriptions that would result from deleting an account:

< xxxx > I'm thinking about leaving ubuntu's world for a while, apart deactivating my launchpad account, what should I do ?
< sladen > you shouldn't need to deactivate your launchpad account
< sladen > but it would be handy to have a "Holiday setting" that stopped emails being generated
< persia > pef: Just let your account lie dormant. If you ever like, you can recover it, and if not, it doesn't take much space on the server. You probably want to unsubscribe from all your bugs, and transition any packages.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

The team mailing list feature <https://blueprints.launchpad.net/launchpad/+spec/team-mailing-lists> may implement vacation/holiday settings, so I'm assigning this wishlist item to myself.

[Jeremy Teale (jteale)]

I think it would also be handy to provide a text-field for a Holiday/Vacation status message. When a team member goes "MIA", it would be nice to go to their LP page and see "busy for a couple days, back on Thurs." as an explanation of absence.

[Maximilian Albert (cilix)]

I wholeheartedly second the above request. It is extremely annoying when you are part of an active team (the Inkscape bug team in my case) but cannot check your emails for a week or two. In one case this resulted in almost completely filling up my inbox so that I couldn't even have received regular email an more.

In addition, as Paul Sladen wrote, there may be times when you need to reduce your LaunchPad activity but want to take it up a couple of months later. It's certainly inappropriate to deactivate your account but there is currently no way (AFAIK) to block email reception for a certain period of time.

Since this is a very basic feature and I expect a lot of people to be missing it, perhaps the importance should be raised?
Also, see Bug #195759 for a related (though different) request.

In any case, thanks for your consideration and your hard work! LaunchPad is extremely useful nonetheless.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

Actually, with Launchpad mailing lists, you /can/ turn off the spigot for a while, it's just not very convenient because you have to manually enable your subscriptions when you return.

If you go to https://launchpad.net/people/+me/+editemails you'll see the list of teams to which you're a member and which have a mailing list. For the lists you want to stop getting messages from, just set your subscription to Don't Subscribe and the message will stop. When you return from vacation, set the subscription back to one of your email addresses and they'll start again.

The vacation feature will simply make re-subscription automatic, and can be used to manage all your subscriptions in one easy place.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

There are two distinct suggestions here: one to temporarily suspend notifications, and one to advertise to other Launchpad users that you're away. Some people will want to use the former, some the latter, and some both, and I doubt they'll be implemented at the same time. So I suggest reporting the latter separately.

[Francis J. Lacoste (flacoste)]

Will be part of post-1.2.6 fix-up weeks.