I've worked quite a few places where lots of e-mails get sent. Due to spam, sending a lot of e-mails actually isn't a simple thing any more. I wish it were, because I'd prefer to send out e-mails to those who want them over having a ton of people running scripts to constantly poll the site.
Even if we ignore the problem of sending too many e-mails such that we increase the risk of getting blacklisted (which would mean we can't even send "I forgot my password" e-mails successfully to a large percentage of our users), we would need to add a "verify my e-mail address" feature and track whether your e-mail is verified.
And then we really should process bounces so that when somebody's address stops working, we stop sending them e-mails (in part because sending e-mails to bouncing addresses contributes even more to the risk of being blacklisted).
And we need a "stop sending me these e-mails" link in the e-mails so that I can stop getting e-mails even if I have no idea how to log in to PerlMonks.
Most of those pieces aren't terribly complicated. Perhaps you can find members of pmdev interested in working on such. There are certainly plenty of members of pmdev.
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