Please read the instructions
below and the posting guide
before sending anything to any mailing list!
Note that the R lists are public discussion
lists and anything you post will be archived and accessible via several
websites for many years.
Thanks to Martin Maechler (and ETH Zurich), there are four general 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.
| R-SIG-Mac | R Special Interest Group on Mac ports of R |
| R-sig-DB | R SIG on Database Interfaces |
| R-SIG-Debian | R Special Interest Group for Debian ports of R |
| R-sig-dynamic-models | Special Interest Group for Dynamic Simulation Models in R |
| R-sig-ecology | Using R in ecological data analysis |
| R-sig-Epi | R for epidemiological data analysis |
| R-SIG-Fedora | R Special Interest Group for Fedora and Redhat ports of R |
| R-SIG-Finance | Special Interest Group for 'R in Finance' |
| R-sig-Geo | R Special Interest Group on using Geographical data and Mapping |
| R-sig-gR | R SIG on gRaphical models |
| R-SIG-GUI | R Special Interest Group on GUI Development |
| R-SIG-HPC | R SIG on High-Performance Computing |
| R-SIG-Insurance | Special Interest Group on using R in actuarial science and insurance |
| R-sig-Jobs | R SIG List for Announcements of Jobs where R is used |
| R-sig-mediawiki | R SIG on the R Extension for Mediawiki |
| R-sig-mixed-models | R SIG on Mixed Effect Models, notably lmer() related |
| R-sig-networks | R SIG for users and developers of network- or graph-related software within R |
| R-sig-phylo | R SIG on phylogenetic and comparative methods and analyses |
| R-sig-QA | R SIG on Quality Assurance & Validation |
| R-sig-Robust | R SIG on Robust Statistics |
| R-sig-teaching | SIG on Teaching Statistics (and more) using R |
| R-sig-Wiki | SIG on the Development of an "R Wiki" |
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
spam-filtered or otherwise intercepted completely and without notice to
the sender.
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@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@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.