OpenBSD Mailing Lists

Mailing lists are an important means of communication among users and developers of OpenBSD. With the exception of announce, the lists are not moderated (but see below). 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. Messages that do not include a plain text part will be summarily rejected. A small number of attachment types are allowed on the mailing lists to support sending patches, shar files, images and small tar or zip files. Other attachment types may cause messages to be sent to the moderator for approval.

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. Users who post off-topic messages may find that their messages are sent to the moderator for approval before being posted (or dropped). Posts containing bullying or abusive language may also result in a user's subsequent messages being sent to a moderator for approval. Repeat offenders will have their messages silently dropped.

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 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.

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.

[email protected] (Archive)

Announcements and security advisories.

[email protected] (Archive)

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.

[email protected] (Archive)

Promoting the use of OpenBSD.

[email protected] (Archive)

Discussions about using and contributing to the ports tree.

[email protected] (Archive)

General discussions, issues and ideas about native and portable OpenSMTPD. Patches for the portable bits should be pull requests on Github. To subscribe there, follow instructions from the OpenSMTPD website.

[email protected] (Archive)

General discussions, issues and ideas about native and portable OpenBGPD. Patches for the portable bits should be pull requests on Github.

Developer Lists

These lists are for technical discussions of aspects of OpenBSD. They are NOT for beginners 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.

[email protected] (Archive)

Bug reports as sent in via sendbug(1) and follow-up discussion.

[email protected] (Archive)

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.

[email protected] (Archive)

Technical discussion about native and portable LibreSSL. Patches for the portable bits should be pull requests on Github.

Reporting Security Issues

[email protected]

Report vulnerabilities related to OpenBSD.

[email protected]

Report vulnerabilities related to OpenSSH.

[email protected]

Report vulnerabilities related to LibreSSL.

[email protected]

Report vulnerabilities related to OpenSMTPD.

Platform-Specific Lists

These lists are focused on user issues and development on individual platforms.

[email protected] (Archive)

OpenBSD/alpha port.

[email protected] (Archive)

OpenBSD/armv7 and OpenBSD/arm64 ports.

[email protected] (Archive)

OpenBSD/hppa port.

[email protected] (Archive)

OpenBSD/luna88k port.

[email protected] (Archive)

OpenBSD/macppc and other PowerPC porting efforts.

[email protected] (Archive)

OpenBSD/sparc64 port.

CVS Changes Mailing Lists

[email protected] (Archive)

Automated mail of CVS source tree changes in the src, xenocara and www repositories.

[email protected] (Archive)

Automated mail of CVS source tree changes in the ports repository.

Mirror-Related Lists

[email protected]

This is a moderated list used solely for important announcements to operators of OpenBSD mirrors.

[email protected]

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 [email protected].

To subscribe to a given list, send mail to [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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

Other Mailing Lists

[email protected] (Archive)

Discussions about the OpenBSD packet filter. To subscribe, send an email with a message body of "subscribe" to [email protected]. More info here.

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:

French: [email protected] (Archive)
To subscribe, send a message to [email protected]

Spanish: [email protected]
To subscribe, visit the URL at: https://groups.google.com/group/OpenBSD-Mexico

Ukrainian: [email protected]
To subscribe, send an empty message to [email protected]