General & Project Mailing Lists

Last updated 2003-10

Introduction

All our lists are public. They are not private message centers. Messages posted to them are carried by, among others, Gmane and Google. Therefore, consider carefully what you say.

Anyone can post to our most popular lists, but if you are not already subscribed, your message will be moderated. In this way, we limit the amount of spam entering the message lists.

Of the lists to which you might consider subscribing, the most useful are the "discuss," "users," and "announce." Both the discuss and users lists accept posts; the announce list does not. Its function is to disseminate important information that is of interest to the general community. Individual projects have their own announce and discuss lists, too. As a rule, honor the nature of the list.

If you want to post a message without it being moderated, please subscribe to the relevant mailing list. To subscribe to any list, all you have to do is click on the "Normal" or "Digest" links and send on the empty email message that will be automatically generated and addressed. This message is just to let the friendly computer know of your intentions; you will immediately, upon sending this first note, receive a confirmation notice. Follow the instructions and send it back. Thus, to subscribe to the general discuss list, you just send mail to discuss-subscribe@openoffice.org and then follow the instructions.

OpenOffice.org Member Responsibilities: Mail Lists

1. Members are encouraged to participate in any mailing list as long as they honor Open Source principles of respect to other members and to the project at hand and abide by the basic rules of netiquette. (See the Guidelines for information.)
2. Repeated violation of these principles will result in suspension of the subscriber's membership in the relevant mailing list. If the subscriber insists on joining under different aliases, the subscriber's posts will be quarantined.
3. Spam is not tolerated. For the most part, OpenOffice.org avoids spam by restricting posts to subscribers. In the rare case where a spammer subscribes to a list and posts spam to the list, he or she will be deleted from the list. Continued violation will result in the spammer being reported to his or her ISP (Internet Service Provider).
4. Please do not send attachments with your message, as they add to the bandwidth burden we must all deal with. OpenOffice.org features several other avenues for persons interested in submitting attachments. Check with your project lead or send a message to webmasters@openoffice.org to find out which would be best for you.

Mailing List Guidelines

Please familiarize yourself with the Mailing List Guidelines, if you have not already.

Newsgroups

For those who prefer to use newsgroups rather than e-mail mailing lists, there are the Gmane newsgroups. For more information on Gmane, contact Gmane. To correspond via newsgroups, you can use open-source command-line clients, Mozilla, or many other clients. The Gmane server address is:

• news.gmane.org

Then enter the list you wish to subscribe to; see below for the ones available or scan Gmane's list, which is always growing. Many specific projects also use Gmane. For instance, ES, Groupware are two projects that use Gmane. If you want your project lists to use Gmane, contact Gmane directly and set it up. It's easy.

Process

E-mails that are sent by subscribers to the mailing lists are automatically forwarded to the relevant Newsgroup. Conversely, posts to a Newsgroup are forwarded to the appropriate mailing list. That is, the operation of Gmane is bidirectional. It is not necessary to be subscribed to a mailing list to be able to post to a Newsgroup. The Gmane system uses its own authorization process. Thus, to post to a Newsgroup, do the following:

• Post a message to the appropriate Newsgroup. You will receive an authorization request from Gmane.
• Reply to that request.
• Your post will then appear in both the Gmane newsgroup and it will also appear on the mailing list.
• You will need to be authorized for each Newsgroup to which you post (but only once per group)

Gmane newsgroups are listed next to the relevant mail lists. If a newsgroup is not listed and exists, please contact us.

Project Mailing Lists

Please visit your project's homepage to see what lists are available for the project you're interested in.

The list below is of the most popular Engish-language lists, but be aware that there are many other projects and lists available.

Here is a general description of available lists; many projects have more than these, so be sure and check with the project page for specifics:

dev@<project>.openoffice.org
This list is designated for discussion about project implementation issues, and is for developers only.
features@<project>.openoffice.org
This is an announce list for new project features. Only authorized persons can post to this list
issues@<project>.openoffice.org
This list carries project-specific automatically generated mails from the bug tracking system (IssueZilla).
cvs@<project>.openoffice.org
This list carries generated mails for changes on the files within this project. No posts to this list are possible.

Mailing List Problems?

If you're having problems with any of the lists, please contact the list owner rather than posting your problem to the whole list. Addresses for list owners take the form listname-owner@openoffice.org, so for example the discuss list owner address would be discuss-owner@openoffice.org

By far the most common mailing list problem is attempting to unsubscribe from an address that is not subscribed. If you need to unsubscribe a specific address, say "mary@host.domain", send a blank email to discuss-unsubscribe-mary=host.domain@openoffice.org.

If none of this helps, and you still have questions, please contact us.