Several months ago, Dave Cantrell noticed he wasn't receiving the Daily Summaries for some of his distributions that had received FAIL reports, and were shown on his Reports page. This began a series of code fixes and debugging that never seemed to resolve the issue.

With the recent changes to the CPAN Testers Statistics site, to reduce SQL calls and generally improve processing, I began the same with the Daily Summary code. Having added some additional logging information and reorganising the SQL queries, the problem Dave highlighted became clear. One of the SQL queries wasn't returning exactly what I expected, at least not all the time. In most cases it would, but you had to catch it just right to see what was happening. As a result the bug is now fixed, and Daily Summaries are flowing properly again.

The recent clean up has also highlighted another problem, that is outside of the scope of anything CPAN Testers specific, and resides with authors themselves. It amazes me how many authors give false or invalid addresses, or change their address and forget to update their PAUSE account. Is it any wonder that some have trouble trying to contact authors. At some point, using the CPAN Testers Preferences system, I plan to start publishing a list of PAUSE IDs that fail to respond. Those with full boxes won't be included, but will specifically highlight IDs that return invalid address error messages.

I see this as being a useful resource to remind authors that their PAUSE account may need updating, and also for anyone wishing to contact an author, whether there is any likelihood of them actually receiving a useful response. There are currently 7744 PAUSE accounts (at the time of writing), and although the number returning errors is quite small, it's enough to be annoying for those trying to contact those particular authors.