# Code of conduct MailFathom is a small project. This document is short for the same reason, and it is written to be applied rather than cited. Everyone participating in this repository — through issues, discussions, pull requests, reviews, and commit messages — is covered by it, whatever their experience, background, or identity. ## What is expected - **Assume good faith.** A confusing question, a wrong patch, and a blunt review are ordinarily what they look like: a person working with incomplete information, in a language that may not be their first. - **Review the work, not the author.** "This leaks the connection on the failure path" is a review. "This is amateur work" is not, and it says nothing the first sentence did not. - **Keep the language plain.** Blunt is welcome here, and a blunt review is usually kinder than a hedged one. Obscenity, sneering, and contempt are not bluntness: they carry nothing the plain sentence did not, and they make every later reader work past the tone to reach the point. - **Say why.** A rejected approach costs the contributor the same amount of time whether or not the reason was given, and only the reason lets the next attempt be better. - **Accept the answer.** The maintainer decides what this project builds. Argue the technical case as hard as it deserves, then let a settled decision stay settled. - **Respect a stated boundary.** When someone asks that a line of discussion stop, it stops. ## What is not acceptable - Harassment, whether directed at someone here or continued from elsewhere. - Intimidation and deliberate provocation: needling, following someone from thread to thread, reopening a settled argument to get a reaction, and piling on one person. Sustained hostility needs no insult in it to make someone stop taking part. - Insults, demeaning remarks, and comments about a person rather than about their work. - Abusive, obscene, or degrading language, and slurs of any kind. This holds whatever it is aimed at — a person, their patch, or nobody in particular — because language aimed at nobody still tells every reader what passes as normal here. - Discriminatory or stereotyping remarks, including ones framed as jokes, about race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, age, disability, neurodivergence, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, appearance, or any comparable characteristic. - Sexual attention or imagery. This project has no context in which either belongs. - Publishing someone's private information, or the private contents of a conversation, without their permission. - Impersonating someone, or using an identity to evade a previous enforcement action. - Threats of any kind, and encouragement of harm. - Deliberately wasting others' time: knowingly false reports, contributions submitted without the right to submit them, and content produced to look like work rather than to be it. The last one is not a rule about using AI. This project is [built with it](CONTRIBUTING.md#how-this-project-is-built), and an agent-written pull request is the normal shape of a contribution here. What it rules out is submitting output nobody has read — by volume, or as an answer nobody checked — so that the reading falls to whoever responds. The tool that produced a change says nothing about it; whether the person submitting it stands behind it says everything. ## Where it applies Everywhere this project happens: the repository and everything in it, and any other space where someone is representing MailFathom. Behavior outside those spaces is in scope only where it makes participation here unsafe — a credible threat against a contributor is that, whatever platform carried it. ## Reporting Email . It reaches the maintainer directly and privately, and it is the same address the [security policy](SECURITY.md) uses, because both need a channel nobody else reads. A useful report says what happened, where, and when — links help. Reporting something that turns out not to be a violation carries no cost; the only thing that reliably goes wrong here is an incident nobody mentioned. Reports are treated confidentially. Your identity is not disclosed to the person reported, or to anyone else, without your agreement. The maintainer is the only person who acts on reports, which has one consequence worth stating plainly: **there is nowhere to appeal a decision to, and a report about the maintainer goes to the maintainer.** That is a real limitation of a single-maintainer project rather than an oversight, and the honest answer is that a fork is the remedy the license already guarantees you. This document would be lying if it described an escalation path that does not exist. ## Consequences A response is proportionate to what happened, and it is not a fixed ladder — an escalating sequence assumes repeat behavior a project this size rarely sees. Depending on severity, a violation may lead to a private request to stop, an edited or deleted comment or commit message with the reason stated, a closed issue or pull request, or a block from the repository. Serious cases lead to a block on the first occurrence. Where a violation touches someone directly, what they need comes before what the process would otherwise do next. ## Attribution This document is MailFathom's own, written for this project, and it is covered by the repository's [AGPL-3.0-only license](LICENSE) like every other file here.