This package is an accompaniment to the Bioconductor Maintainer Validation App. It displays a list of the currently active Bioconductor packages and their maintainers. The Bioconductor Maintainer Validation App sends a reminder email to maintainers of Bioconductor policies and procedures. Maintainers are required to opt-in to the Bioconductor policies once a year. This vignette demonstrates convenient wrappers to the application api for common queries against the database. See also the BiocMaintainerShiny vignette for how to launch the accompanied shiny app.
This package provides convenient R functions that wrap around the Bioconductor Maintainer Validation App API.
There are three functions that return data.frames of maintainer information that include: name, package, email, consent_date, email_status, is_email_valid. These functions take either the package name, maintainer email, or maintainer name as argument:
## By package name
getInfoByPackage("BiocFileCache")
#> package name email consent_date
#> 1 BiocFileCache Lori Shepherd [email protected] 2025-12-01
#> email_status is_email_valid
#> 1 valid 1
## By maintainer email
tbl <- getInfoByEmail("[email protected]")
head(tbl)
#> email name package
#> 1 [email protected] Bioconductor Package Maintainer annotate
#> 2 [email protected] Bioconductor Package Maintainer AnnotationDbi
#> 3 [email protected] Bioconductor Package Maintainer AnnotationFilter
#> 4 [email protected] Bioconductor Package Maintainer AnnotationForge
#> 5 [email protected] Bioconductor Package Maintainer AnnotationHub
#> 6 [email protected] Bioconductor Package Maintainer AnnotationHubData
#> consent_date email_status is_email_valid
#> 1 2025-12-01 valid 1
#> 2 2025-12-01 valid 1
#> 3 2025-12-01 valid 1
#> 4 2025-12-01 valid 1
#> 5 2025-12-01 valid 1
#> 6 2025-12-01 valid 1
## By maintainer name
## Then list packages associated
tbl <- getInfoByName("Hervé Pagès")
head(tbl$package)
#> [1] "BiocGenerics" "Biostrings" "BSgenome" "BSgenomeForge"
#> [5] "DelayedArray" "GenomeInfoDb"There is also a function that takes an email and returns if it is valid or not. If it is not valid, it will also return a data.frame of additional information collected to try to indicate the resason for the failed delivery. The return value of this function is a list with argument ‘valid’ and optionally ‘data’.
isEmailValid("[email protected]")
#> $valid
#> [1] TRUEThere are four list functions to help retrieve emails that are not necessarily valid either because emails cannot be delivered to the email or the maintainer has not consented to Bioconductor policies in the last year.
## list invalid
## maintainers that emails cannot be delivered and any information on failure
## this is a data.frame
tbl <- listInvalid()
head(tbl)
#> email name package email_status
#> 1 [email protected] Wentao Yang ABSSeq suppressed
#> 2 [email protected] Peter Dimitrov aCGH suppressed
#> 3 [email protected] Cuilan lani Gao AGDEX bounced
#> 4 [email protected] Pedro Lopez-Romero AgiMicroRna suppressed
#> 5 [email protected] Wancen Mu airpart suppressed
#> 6 [email protected] Dong Li AMOUNTAIN suppressed
#> bounce_type bounce_subtype smtp_status
#> 1 BOUNCE <NA> <NA>
#> 2 BOUNCE <NA> <NA>
#> 3 Permanent General 5.1.10
#> 4 BOUNCE <NA> <NA>
#> 5 BOUNCE <NA> <NA>
#> 6 BOUNCE <NA> <NA>
#> diagnostic_code
#> 1 2026-01-11 03:07:31 +0000
#> 2 2026-01-11 03:00:20 +0000
#> 3 smtp;550 5.1.10 RESOLVER.ADR.RecipientNotFound; Recipient not found by SMTP address lookup
#> 4 2025-02-25 17:00:05 +0000
#> 5 2026-01-11 03:00:29 +0000
#> 6 2023-03-06 17:00:07 +0000
## list needs consent
## maintainers have not consented to policies in the last year
tbl <- listNeedsConsent()
head(tbl)
#> [1] "[email protected]" "[email protected]"
#> [3] "[email protected]" "[email protected]"
#> [5] "[email protected]" "[email protected]"
## list bad emails
## combo: invalid and needs consent
tbl <- listAllBadEmails()
head(tbl)
#> [1] "[email protected]" "[email protected]"
#> [3] "[email protected]" "[email protected]"
#> [5] "[email protected]" "[email protected]"
## list suppression list
## emails that appear on aws suppression list and would not try to send
## this is list. 'data' element contains a data.frame of name and email
tbl <- listEmailsOnSuppressionList()
head(tbl$data)
#> email name
#> 1 [email protected] Wentao Yang
#> 2 [email protected] Peter Dimitrov
#> 3 [email protected] Pedro Lopez-Romero
#> 4 [email protected] Wancen Mu
#> 5 [email protected] Dong Li
#> 6 [email protected] Christian OertlinIf the prebuilt functions are not sufficient and you would like to perform your own analysis, there is a function to download the current version of the database.
all_data <- get_maintainer_data()
tail(all_data)
#> package name email consent_date
#> 3951 phylobar Kris Sankaran [email protected] 2026-05-11
#> 3952 BamScale Chirag Parsania [email protected] 2026-05-11
#> 3953 dnaEPICO Paul Ruiz [email protected] 2026-05-18
#> 3954 DaparToolshed Samuel Wieczorek [email protected] 2026-05-20
#> 3955 panoramic Jacob Chang [email protected] 2026-05-20
#> 3956 MSTree Abdullah El-Kurdi [email protected] 2026-05-25
#> email_status is_email_valid last_verification_sent bounce_type
#> 3951 new TRUE <NA> <NA>
#> 3952 new TRUE <NA> <NA>
#> 3953 new TRUE <NA> <NA>
#> 3954 new TRUE <NA> <NA>
#> 3955 new TRUE <NA> <NA>
#> 3956 new TRUE <NA> <NA>
#> bounce_subtype smtp_status diagnostic_code needs_consent
#> 3951 <NA> <NA> <NA> FALSE
#> 3952 <NA> <NA> <NA> FALSE
#> 3953 <NA> <NA> <NA> FALSE
#> 3954 <NA> <NA> <NA> FALSE
#> 3955 <NA> <NA> <NA> FALSE
#> 3956 <NA> <NA> <NA> FALSEThe following provide brief descriptions of columns:
The remaining columns are utilized if additional information when an email is bounced can be retrieved. This is used as potential diagnostic and resolution.
sessionInfo()
#> R version 4.6.0 (2026-04-24)
#> Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
#> Running under: Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS
#>
#> Matrix products: default
#> BLAS: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libblas.so.3
#> LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libopenblasp-r0.3.26.so; LAPACK version 3.12.0
#>
#> locale:
#> [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C
#> [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
#> [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
#> [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C
#> [9] LC_ADDRESS=C LC_TELEPHONE=C
#> [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
#>
#> time zone: Etc/UTC
#> tzcode source: system (glibc)
#>
#> attached base packages:
#> [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
#>
#> other attached packages:
#> [1] BiocMaintainerApp_1.1.0 BiocStyle_2.41.0
#>
#> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
#> [1] cli_3.6.6 knitr_1.51 rlang_1.2.0
#> [4] xfun_0.57 otel_0.2.0 promises_1.5.0
#> [7] shiny_1.13.0 xtable_1.8-8 jsonlite_2.0.0
#> [10] DT_0.34.0 buildtools_1.0.0 htmltools_0.5.9
#> [13] maketools_1.3.2 httpuv_1.6.17 sys_3.4.3
#> [16] sass_0.4.10 rmarkdown_2.31 evaluate_1.0.5
#> [19] jquerylib_0.1.4 shinyjs_2.1.1 fastmap_1.2.0
#> [22] yaml_2.3.12 lifecycle_1.0.5 BiocManager_1.30.27
#> [25] compiler_4.6.0 codetools_0.2-20 Rcpp_1.1.1-1.1
#> [28] htmlwidgets_1.6.4 later_1.4.8 digest_0.6.39
#> [31] R6_2.6.1 magrittr_2.0.5 bslib_0.11.0
#> [34] tools_4.6.0 mime_0.13 shinythemes_1.2.0
#> [37] cachem_1.1.0