Linux – Participating on the kernel mailing list

emaillinuxlinux-kernel

I know this questions is a bit edgy regarding the rules. I will ask it regardless for this is the community that might benefit most from it, and the Stack Exchange interface is much more suited for newcomers.

  • How to subscribe to the mailing list of the Linux kernel or a specific kernel subsystem?

  • How to post to the mailing list?

  • What is the proper way to reply to someone who replied to my post?

  • Are there specific email clients that can cause problems with interacting with the mailing list?

Best Answer

The official documentation is here. I'm starting this as a community wiki with the answers that I know.

At the time of this writing sending a test mail from gmail to autoanswer@vger.kernel.org results in errors:

554 5.0.0 Hi [209.85.218.48], unresolvable address: <autoanswer@vger.kernel.org>; nosuchuser; autoanswer@vger.kernel.org

How to subscribe to the mailing list of the linux kernel or a specific kernel subsystem?

Chose the subsystem you'd like to subscribe to from here. This example will chose linux-bluetooth.

The subscription email will need to be sent in plain text. Be sure to check that first :

  • Gmail web client -> there is a Plain text mode you can set

The second part is to generate the content of the mail.

To:

majordomo@vger.kernel.org

Email body:

subscribe linux-bluetooth

Notice that the subject is empty and that is how it should be.

If that was successfully received, the server will respond with a message welcoming you to the subsystem mailing list.

How to post to the mailing list?

To post to the mailing list one subscribed to above use the following:

To:

linux-bluetooth@vger.kernel.org

Subject:

Your arbitrary subject

Email body:

Your arbitrary plain text body

The status with Gmail web client at the moment is that you don't receive your own posts from the mailing list, but they do end sent to the all the other subscribers. Don't know a fix for that atm.

Related Question