Skip to main content

New Mailing Lists for the Cormas Community

· 2 min read
Oleksandr Zaitsev
Oleksandr Zaitsev
CS Researcher at UMR SENS, CIRAD

We are happy to announce that the Cormas project now provides three dedicated mailing lists to better support our community of modelers, developers, and collaborators.

Why mailing lists?​

Mailing lists remain a reliable, accessible, and lightweight way to connect people across institutions, projects, and geographies. They work everywhere - regardless of whether you use Gmail, Outlook, or your university address - and they keep discussions archived and searchable for the long term.

For a project like Cormas, which brings together researchers, practitioners, and developers from many different contexts, mailing lists are a natural fit.

The new Cormas mailing lists​

modelers@cormas.org​

A community space for users, modelers, and practitioners of Cormas.

  • Share experiences, ask questions, and exchange models and practices.
  • Announce events, workshops, or training sessions.
  • Open subscription: anyone can join and participate.

devs@cormas.org​

A private list for the core developers of Cormas.

  • Used to coordinate technical development, code evolution, and release planning.
  • Membership is restricted to the development team.
  • Keeps the developer discussions focused, while user support remains on modelers@cormas.org.

contact@cormas.org​

A public contact point for anyone who wants to reach the Cormas team.

  • Designed for external inquiries, collaborations, and general contact.
  • Managed by the list owners; not a discussion list.

Why self-host with Sympa?​

There are many mailing list services available today, from Google Groups to commercial mailing platforms. We chose to self-host our own instance of Sympa, an open-source mailing list manager, for several reasons:

  • Autonomy: We wanted full control over subscription policies, moderation, and archiving.
  • Privacy: No third-party service mines or monetizes community data.
  • Integration: Sympa integrates well with our infrastructure and allows us to configure different policies for modelers, developers, and contact.
  • Community alignment: Just like Cormas itself, Sympa is open-source software maintained by an active community.

By self-hosting Sympa on our own domain (cormas.org), we ensure long-term stability, independence, and flexibility for how we organize our communication.

How to get involved​

We hope these lists will make it easier for the Cormas community to share knowledge, exchange ideas, and build collaborations.