Comment 11 for bug 1589693

The messages in question represent actions taken by the user whom Launchpad then lists in the From: line, and in most cases consist principally of body text that that user wrote. This is only "impersonation" if you take a very narrow MTA-centric view of who the person is. Morally, the situation is more like that of mailing lists resending messages they receive from users (with the main differences being that the origin of the message might be a mail user agent or might be an HTTP client, and that in some situations Launchpad will generate body text representing the user's actions rather than solely passing on lightly-modified body text provided by the user). If you're subscribed to this bug and you receive this message from me, it really is in essence a message from me and not from Launchpad.

Now, I'm not in general opposed to changes that adjust Launchpad's email headers so that it doesn't trip over DMARC implementations, although it would need quite a bit of care to go through all the relevant call sites and make sure that any such changes preserve the proper natural reply behaviour, and we should consider things like whether we want a From: address per (e.g.) bug or per Launchpad user. All this would take a fair amount of effort and discussion.

We may indeed nowadays be in an environment where we have little choice; but let's be clear that it would be a change made for operational reasons to improve the reliability of our mail delivery, and not for essentially moral reasons such as impersonation.

As for Launchpad being open source, yes it is, and there's a link with details at the bottom of every page on launchpad.net.