Question regarding hard-coded "in product marketing" email address team@gitlab.com

Hi, I am a SRE from jihulab.com.

We've been receiving several errors from SMTP service.

In detail, the error is 436 "MAIL FROM" doesn't conform with authentication [@sm060104] (Auth Account:message@msg.jihulab.com|Mail Account:team@gitlab.com), cause “auth address (our configured mail address)” is inconsistent with “from address (this team@gitlab.com)“.

We found these errors on sentry, the sidekiq job InProductMarketingEmailsWorker complained about this.

image

I searched in the repo, and found that this team@gitlab.com is hard coded (link to code) as a “from address”, and reckon that's what causing 436 error as we’ve configured a different account for our SMTP service.

My questions are: what does this “in product marketing” mean? what are these emails about, or what is the impact on users if they do not receive these emails?

/cc @marin Thanks for your kind help!