Introduction

Bioconductor policies include being an active and reachable maintainer. Maintainer emails in the DESCRIPTION of packages often go stale as maintainers change positions. There is also a necessity to have maintainers opt into Bioconductor policies and procedures as they change over time.

We have created an application that uses Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) to send periodic emails to maintainers to check if the endpoint is reachable and to send a verification opt-in of Bioconductor current policies and procedures and code of conduct once a year.

Initial feedback is that this email is “spammy” and may be marked as such by institutions, but it is an initial attempt at compliance. We will look at alternatives to emails like specialized maintainer account access at a future date.