and if we're gonna add the scripting needed to read this from the 'automation' dir, then might as well read from Gerrit. it is not considerably harder.

another alternative - automatically add maintainers as reviewers on merge. This will make them get all messages added after merge.

because long-term we want to get rid of the project files, so I'd rather not add features to them.

I don't see a reason why not, if its in the project file ( or in the automation/*.emails after we get rid of the yaml files ).

these are std-ci jobs, I'd rather not go down the path of making this configurable from YAML.

you recently enabled email plugin to other jobs no? let's drop the idea of getting the list of maintainers from Gerrit for now cause it seems to be more complex and probably overkill. can you help with sending a patch to specific people? ( we can fetch the list of maintainers from the Gerrit for starts )