New Developer Mailing List

Over the past two years, mail delivery via the Launchpad mailing list has become increasingly spotty. Sometimes mail does not reach the launchpad archive (and therefore does not get delivered) and sometimes mail reaches the archive but does not get delivered to the recipients.

In neither case does the KiCad team have visibility on the rejected messages or any ability to recitify the problem. This leads to many messages to the list going unanswered until someone directly asks a KiCad team member about the mailing list.

When migrating our repository from Launchpad, we considered a number of different list servers including self-hosting mailman, groups.io, Framalistes and GitHub. While each of these would perform some parts of what we wanted, we needed to minimize our system administration time (so that we can do more KiCad coding) while not excessively increasing our monthly costs.

From this point of view, staging the mailing list on our Google Workspace instance made the most sense. We are able to manage the list in detail and get administrative feedback when messages are rejected or delayed. We also get to ensure that the list and its data are fully owned by the KiCad team. This will allow us to migrate the list more easily in the future, should the Google instance no longer be tenable.

We understand that some of our users are justifiably suspicious of sending mail though a Google-hosted service. While we cannot guarantee any behaviour on the part of Google, we can say that this service is part of the corporate Google Workspace package that currently promises not to scan any data contained within it (https://workspace.google.com/learn-more/security/security-whitepaper/page-6.html).

You can send an e-mail to [email protected]. You do not need a Google-based e-mail address to subscribe to the mailing list. You can view the archives at https://groups.google.com/a/kicad.org/g/devlist without a Google account as well.