List frontdesk, not execdir, on the contact page
The current situation, which we inherited slowly over time, is that https://www.torproject.org/about/contact#email lists only donations@ and execdir@ as contact addresses. The result is that execdir gets 5-10 new mails each day from people who are trying to get support or otherwise trying to reach a real human. I have no idea what donations@ gets, but probably at least that many since it's listed first.
At the same time, we quietly created frontdesk@, with the goal of shifting traffic to it once the new support site is ready. Colin and Alison stepped in to be interim frontdesk people. For the past year or so I have been bouncing mails from execdir to frontdesk when I get around to doing it. But I haven't done that since July now, which means 300+ sad people who never even got an acknowledgement to their mail that they sent to (to be fair, from our perspective) the wrong place.
But why wait for the support page to be ready? I think we should list frontdesk on the contact page now. Shari also pointed out that we could remove execdir, and then the frontdesk folks could fwd mail that the execdir folks should see -- rather than the current backwards approach.
Now, another reason we had been delaying re-starting something like a helpdesk was because we had some psychotic behavior in the past where various people thought we needed to not purge incoming mails regularly. We still need to come up with a good data retention (well, more like enforced data deletion) policy, e.g. we scrub tickets after they've been in the system for 30 days. And we need to think through the safety aspects for our users of whether we have, or cause to exist, interesting metadata like network traces of people sending us email. Our reasoning so far has been "Well, we didn't encourage them to mail us, so it's not really our fault if they do. We hope they've thought it through", and I think we can do better.
But in the mean time, I think we should be able to get started by putting a nice clear warning next to the frontdesk address on the contact page, telling people that it's not for support, and if they need good privacy they should contact us some other way (should we give some suggestions? maybe not?), and whatever else we want to warn them about before they decide to send the mail. Then the mails will go directly to the people who volunteered to read and handle them. And then we can work to make that frontdesk experience a more sustainable one.