Mailing list tips and etiquette
- Please keep conversations constructive and civil.
- Change the subject of the message if the topic has changed.
- Keep messages on-topic for the list. For example, if you want to follow up on something on emacs-devel but it’s not related to Emacs development, reply to the emacs-tangents mailing list instead.
- If possible, edit quoted text to include only the relevant segment, and reply beneath the quoted text.
- To make it easier for people to search and reply to your message, use a descriptive subject, and try to keep to one topic per message.
- Search the mailing list archives before posting questions. You can usually use your favorite search engine to search for your keywords along with the mailing list name. Alternatively, you can use the search engine on the list archive pages (see below)
- If the mailing list has a code of conduct, please observe it. This page or the list information pages (see below) will contain links to the codes of conduct for mailing lists once they’re published.
- Many projects have their own mailing lists. You can generally find out where that mailing list is by checking the project’s page or README. If you’re not sure where to post, pick the most specific list you can find. If you can’t find anything that’s a good match, post your message to help-gnu-emacs (for general Emacs help) or emacs-tangents (for off-topic conversations). People will probably redirect you to a more specific list if they know of one.
Lists for general Emacs help
- help-gnu-emacs, mailto:help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
- Emacs help (also one of the EmacsNewsgroups) List information, Archive
- help-emacs-windows, mailto:help-emacs-windows@gnu.org
- Emacs on Windows help List information, Archive
Lists for development
- emacs-devel, mailto:emacs-devel@gnu.org
- Emacs development List information, Archive
- bug-gnu-emacs, mailto:bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
- Emacs bugs and feature requests, use M-x report-emacs-bug on Emacs to send stuff to the list List information, Archive
- emacs-pretest-bug, mailto:emacs-pretest-bug@gnu.org
- Emacs bugs for a pretest release. As of 2008-08, merged with emacs-devel. Archive still exists.
- xemacs-beta, mailto:xemacs-beta@xemacs.org
- XEmacs development
- xemacs-patches, mailto:xemacs-patches@xemacs.org
- XEmacs patches
National and regional lists
- mailto:emacs-br@yahoogroups.com
- The Brazilian Emacs users mailing list Subscribe or View archive
- mailto:emacs-es@es.gnu.org
- The Spanish Emacs users mailing list Subscribe or View archive
- mailto:emacs-au-discuss@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au
- The Australian Emacs users mailing list Subscribe or View archive
Other lists
- emacs-tangents, mailto:emacs-tangents@gnu.org
- General discussions List information, Archive
- info-gnu-emacs
- Emacs announcements. List information, Archive
- gnu-emacs-sources, mailto:gnu-emacs-source@gnu.org
- Emacs source code posts only. List information Archive (also one of the EmacsNewsgroups).
- debian-emacsen, mailto:debian-emacsen@lists.debian.org
- Support and developer discussion on Emacs related packages for Debian GNU/Linux. List information, archive
- macosx-emacs, mailto:macosx-emacs@email.esm.psu.edu
- Support for Emacs on Mac OS X, in particular AquamacsEmacs. List information, Archive
- emacs-humanities, mailto:emacs-humanities@gnu.org
- people who use Emacs for things wholly unrelated to programming. Archive. Why Emacs-humanities?
Mailing lists via news
Some of the EmacsNewsgroups are also available as mailing lists. This is bi-directional, so anything you post to the mailing list will appear in the newsgroup and vice versa. It is generally better if you subscribe to newsgroups instead of mailing lists, because then the load is spread among many newsservers instead of one mailing list host.
Many EmacsMailingLists are available as EmacsNewsgroups. For example, you can use the Gmane service to read many Emacs mailing lists in a news reader such as Gnus. On Gmane, the gmane.emacs hierarchy contains most of the Emacs-related lists available there.
Other notes
If there are technical issues with the mailing lists hosted by the FSF, you’ll find status updates at https://hostux.social/@fsfstatus.
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