Buildbot has a somewhat limited awareness of users. It assumes the world consists of a set of developers, each of whom can be described by a couple of simple attributes. These developers make changes to the source code, causing builds which may succeed or fail.
Each developer is primarily known through the source control system. Each
Change object that arrives is tagged with a who field that
typically gives the account name (on the repository machine) of the user
responsible for that change. This string is the primary key by which the
User is known, and is displayed on the HTML status pages and in each Build's
“blamelist”.
To do more with the User than just refer to them, this username needs to be mapped into an address of some sort. The responsibility for this mapping is left up to the status module which needs the address. The core code knows nothing about email addresses or IRC nicknames, just user names.