Please read the instructions below and the posting guide before sending anything to any mailing list!
Thanks to Martin Maechler, there are four mailing lists devoted to R:
This list is for major announcements about the
development of R and the availability of new code.
It has a low volume (typically only a few messages a
month) and everyone mildly interested should consider subscribing,
but note that R-help gets everything from R-announce as well, so
you don't need to subscribe to both of them.
Note that the list is moderated to be used for
announcements mainly by the R Core Development Team.
Use the
web interface for information, subscription, archives, etc.
This list is for announcements as well, usually on the availability of new or enhanced contributed packages (on CRAN, typically).
Note that the list is moderated. However, CRAN package
authors (and others, similarly qualified) can freely post.
As with R-announce, all messages to R-packages are
automatically forwarded to the main R-help mailing list;
we still recommend to subscribe to R-packages if you read R-help
only in digest form.
Use the
web interface for information, subscription, archives, etc.
The ‘main’ R mailing list, for discussion about problems and solutions using R, announcements (not covered by ‘R-announce’ or ‘R-packages’, see above), about the availability of new functionality for R and documentation of R, comparison and compatibility with S-plus, and for the posting of nice examples and benchmarks. Do read the posting guide before sending anything!
This has become quite an active list with dozens of
messages per day. An alternative is to subscribe and choose daily
digests (in plain or MIME format).
Use the
web interface for information, subscription, archives, etc.
If you don't want to receive more than a daily message, you
can subscribe and choose digests (in plain or MIME format).
Use the
web interface for information, subscription, archives, etc.
Note that you should configure your e-mail software in such a way as to
send only plain text, i.e., no HTML.
‘html-ified’ messages are usually considerably longer (in bytes!) and
harder to filter for spam or viruses.
Many of these (e.g. ‘html-only’ ones) are currently intercepted completely.
For more details and instructions on turning off HTML for your e-mail
software, see here.
Furthermore, most binary e-mail attachments are not accepted,
i.e., they are removed from the posting completely. As an
exception, we allow application/pdf, application/postscript, and
image/png (and x-tar and gzip on R-devel). You can use text/plain as well,
or simply paste text into your message instead.
Information about the list can be obtained by sending an email
with ‘info’ as its contents to r-help-request@lists.R-project.org.
Note that you can can subscribe and unsubscribe by E-mail
(instead of the web interface), however to unsubscribe you currently need the
mailing list password which you get when subscribing and in a monthly reminder.
To send a message to everyone on the r-help mailing list, send
email to
r-help@lists.R-project.org.
Do please create a new email message when posting to the list rather than
replying to a previous message and simply changing the subject line!
This allows sensible threading in the mailing list archives (and
many users e-mail readers).
Subscription and posting to the other lists is done
analogously, with ‘r-help’ replaced by ‘r-announce’ and
‘r-devel’, respectively. Note that the r-announce list is
gatewayed into r-help, so you don't need to subscribe to both of
them.
It is recommended that you send mail to r-help (or r-devel if appropriate) rather than only to the R developers (who are also subscribed to the list, of course). This may save them precious time they can use for constantly improving R, and will typically also result in much quicker feedback for yourself.
Of course, in the case of bug reports it would be very helpful to have code which reliably reproduces the problem, see the entry in the R FAQ.