Mailing lists are an important means of communication among users and
developers of OpenBSD.
With the exception of announce, the lists are not moderated.
We deliberately restrict the number of different mailing lists.
This helps reduce the amount of cross-posting and makes sure that
the information gets distributed to a wide audience.
Netiquette
Be considerate of other subscribers on the mailing lists.
- Plain text, 72 characters per line
- Many subscribers and developers read their mail on text-based mailers
like mail(1),
emacs or mutt, and they often find HTML-formatted messages (or lines that
stretch beyond 72 characters) unreadable.
Most OpenBSD mailing lists strip messages of MIME content before sending
them out to the rest of the list.
If you don't use plain text, your messages will be reformatted or, if they
cannot be reformatted, summarily rejected.
The only mailing lists that allow file attachments are the bugs,
ports and tech lists.
They will be removed from messages on the others.
- Do your homework before you post
- If you have an installation question, make sure that you have read
the relevant documents, such as the INSTALL.* text files in the
installation directories, the FAQ and the
relevant man pages (start with
afterboot(8)).
Also check the mailing list archives.
We want to help, but we wouldn't want to deprive you of a valuable
learning experience, and no one wants to see the same question on the
lists for the fifth time in a month.
- Include a useful Subject line
- Messages with an empty Subject will get bounced to the list manager and
will take longer to show up.
Including a relevant Subject in the message
will ensure that more people actually read what you've written.
Also, avoid Subject lines with excessive capitalization.
"Help!" or "I can't get it to work!" are not useful subject lines.
Do not change the subject line while on the same topic.
YOU may know what it is regarding, the rest of us who get several hundred
messages a day will have no idea.
- Trim your signature
- Keep the signature lines at the bottom of your mail to a reasonable
length.
PGP signatures and those automatic address cards are merely annoying and
are stripped out.
Legal disclaimers and advisories are also very annoying, and inappropriate
for public mailing lists.
- Stay on topic
- Please keep the subject of the post relevant to users of OpenBSD.
- Include important information
- Don't waste everyone's time with a hopelessly incomplete question.
No one other than you has the information needed to resolve your
problem, it is better to provide more information than needed than not
enough detail.
All questions should include at least the
version of OpenBSD.
Any hardware-related questions should mention the platform (i386, amd64,
etc.) and provide a full
dmesg(8).
Hardware model numbers, unfortunately, don't indicate much about the
actual content of a particular machine or accessory, and are useless to
anyone who doesn't have that exact machine sitting where they can easily
recognize it.
The dmesg(8) output tells us exactly what is IN your machine, not what
stickers are on the outside.
- Respect differences in opinion and philosophy
- Intelligent people may look at the same set of facts and come to very
different conclusions.
Repeating the same points that didn't convince someone previously rarely
changes their mind, and irritates all the other readers.
- Do not cross-post or repeat post
- Posting the same message to multiple lists and/or multiple times
does not increase the likelihood of getting a useful response, and is
likely to irritate the people you want to help you.
If you didn't get a satisfactory response the first time you posted to an
appropriate list, it is usually because you provided insufficient or unclear
information.
Don't simply repost the same message.
Spam
The OpenBSD lists use spamd(8)
and SpamAssassin to keep down the
spam volume, but things do sneak through from time to time -- deal with it.
In addition, the list server also has regex-based rules to reject emails
based on some common spam and virus telltales.
If you get spam through one of the OpenBSD mailing lists, you don't need to
send a copy to the list owner -- chances are he's already seen it.
Also, please do not submit spam received through the
mailing lists to spamcop,
as this will result in the list server being added to their RBL.
Complaining about and commenting upon spam on the list proper is
counter-productive, as it generates more traffic than the spam itself.
Note that if you are sending mail from a dynamic IP address, you
will probably not be able to post to the mailing lists.
In this case, you should use a smart host mail configuration
that utilizes your ISP's mail server.
See the examples in
smtpd.conf(5) for how
to do this.
General interest lists
These lists are of interest to most users of OpenBSD.
- misc
- User questions and answers, general questions.
This is the most active list.
Please, read the FAQ and the installation
documents, and see how to report a problem
before posting.
- advocacy
- Promoting the use of OpenBSD.
- announce
- Important announcements.
This low volume list is excellent for people who just want occasional news
about the project and errata patch notices.
- ports
- Discussions about using and contributing to the 'ports' source tree.
Developer lists
These lists are for technical discussions of aspects of OpenBSD.
They are NOT for beginning or average users, they are not for problem
reporting (unless you are including a good fix) and they are not for
installation problems.
If you have any question about if a message should be posted to any of
these lists, it probably should not.
Use misc instead.
Again, do not cross post to multiple lists.
- bugs
- Bug reports as sent in via
sendbug(1)
and follow-up discussions.
- tech
- Discussion of technical topics for OpenBSD developers and advanced
users.
This is not a "tech support" forum; do not use it as such.
OpenBSD developers will often make patches to implement new features
and other important changes available for public testing through this
list.
- libressl
- Technical discussion about native and portable LibreSSL.
Users of LibreSSL on any operating system are welcome to participate.
Patches for the native LibreSSL should be sent to this list and use
OpenBSD's CVS tree or a git mirror of it.
Patches for the portable bits should be pull requests on
github.
Security lists
These private lists are for reporting vulnerabilities to the OpenBSD team.
- libressl-security
- Report vulnerabilities related to OpenSSL or LibreSSL to the core
LibreSSL team.
- security
- Report vulnerabilities related to OpenBSD.
Platform-specific lists
These lists are focused on user issues and development on individual
platforms.
- alpha
- OpenBSD/alpha port
- arm
- OpenBSD/zaurus port and other ARM porting efforts
- hppa
- OpenBSD/hppa port
- m88k
- OpenBSD/luna88k port
- ppc
- OpenBSD/macppc and other PowerPC porting efforts
- sgi
- OpenBSD/sgi port
- sparc
- OpenBSD/sparc64 port
CVS changes mailing lists
Every time a developer commits a change to the OpenBSD CVS tree, a message
is mailed out to all the subscribers of these lists, containing the commit
comments.
- source-changes
- Automated mail of CVS source tree changes in the src, xenocara and www
repositories.
- ports-changes
- Automated mail of CVS source tree changes in the ports repository.
Mirror-related lists
Announcements and discussion relating to mirrors of OpenBSD.
- mirrors-announce
- This is a moderated list used solely for important announcements
to operators of OpenBSD mirrors.
- mirrors-discuss
- Discussion relating to OpenBSD mirrors.
Managing list membership via Majordomo
If you want to be sent a complete list with all mailing lists available
at openbsd.org, send the command lists in the body of
a message to
majordomo@OpenBSD.org.
To subscribe to a given list, send mail to
majordomo@OpenBSD.org
with a message body of "subscribe mailing-list-name" (where
mailing-list-name is the name of your preferred list).
For further assistance, send a message body of "help" to
majordomo@OpenBSD.org
and you will receive a reply outlining all your options.
Your domain must resolve properly or the mail will not go through!
Managing list membership via the web
Your membership to the OpenBSD mailing lists can also be managed via
a web interface at lists.openbsd.org.
Mailing list tricks
There are a number of very useful options that can be selected, either
by the web interface or through
Majordomo.
You can change your email address without having to unsubscribe and
resubscribe, temporarily disable your message delivery for a few days
while you go on vacation and much more.
The user is invited to spend some time reading through the options, available
by sending Majordomo a message
containing "help" as the body text, or through the "Help" tab of the
web interface.
As an example, if you were going on vacation for two weeks and didn't
wish to come back to several thousand emails, you can disable message
delivery by the mail server for the time of your vacation and have
delivery automatically resume upon your scheduled return using the command:
set ALL nomail-14d
This will suspend your subscription to all mailing lists for 14 days
(-14d).
More details and options can be seen on the
Majordomo overview page.
Digests
If you would prefer to see a "digest" (a consolidated listing of all the
messages for a time period), rather than getting messages individually
in "real-time" form, you can use the commands:
set misc digest-daily
set source-changes digest-weekly
for daily digests of the misc list, and weekly digests of the
source-changes list.
Yes, multiple commands can be placed in one Majordomo email.
Other Mailing Lists
The fine folks at squish.net run
mailing lists with daily and weekly digests of the OpenBSD source-changes
and ports-changes mailing list.
This is handy for those who don't like the typically high volume of these lists.
The insomniac at
benzedrine.ch maintains the pf list for people using the
OpenBSD packet filter.
To subscribe, send an email with the message body of "subscribe" to
pf-request@benzedrine.ch.
Non-English lists
Several non-English speaking mailing lists related to OpenBSD are available
separately.
Here is a list of the currently known mailing lists:
Dutch:
openbsd@list.ii.nl
To subscribe, visit the URL at:
https://list.ii.nl/mailman/listinfo/openbsd.
French:
misc@openbsd-france.org
To subscribe, visit the URL at:
http://www.openbsd-france.org/communaute.php.
Italian:
openbsd@sikurezza.org
To subscribe, send an empty message to
openbsd-subscribe@sikurezza.org.
Japanese:
openbsd-japan@googlegroups.com
To subscribe, visit the URL at:
http://groups.google.com/group/openbsd-japan
Spanish:
OpenBSD-Mexico@googlegroups.com
To subscribe, visit the URL at:
http://groups.google.com.mx/group/OpenBSD-Mexico
Ukrainian:
openbsd@uaoug.org.ua
To subscribe, send an empty message to
openbsd+subscribe@uaoug.org.ua
Mailing list archives
These mailing list archives are not managed by the OpenBSD project.
General search engines also prove very effective at finding answers to
OpenBSD questions.