I don't know about you, but I use my perlmonks reference quite often:

• at business meetings ("Did I mention I'm a perlmonk?"- "You're hired; name your salary!")
• as a pickup line ("Did I mention I'm a perlmonk?" -"Your place or mine, hotcakes!")
• links in web pages as discussion references on various topics (can you say "merlyn"?)

While it's nice to tell them that I'm a perlmonk, I would feel more "official" about it if I could throw 'em an email address like agentm@perlmonks.org. Know what I mean?

In the great tradition of eternally expanding an already humongous website, I propose MonkMail! I can't imagine that we would actually need an online mail reader- that's not at all what I suggest (though if I were to, I would suggest a morph of NeoMail). Since we already have our own thousands of email addresses and seeing that one needs an email address to get an account here, I'd be perfectly happy with a forwarding address mechanism here.

Perhaps these things need to be thought through:

• do ALL users get the this feature or higher level users ONLY? (perhaps to prevent a bloated sendmail table)
• can one use the perlmonks SMTP to send mail as the user? receive only then?
• can the user change his forwarding address?
• perlmonks signature on every email (like yahoo)?

This is what might vroom have had in mind when he wrote something like "the email field may provide some other functionality in the future" on the new user page. What do you guys think?

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