We decided to close tails-support@boum.org, the public mailing list for user support which was created in 2013 after closing the forum that we had on this website.

The idea behind having a public space for user support was to:

• Reduce the amount of work for our help desk behind tails-support-private@boum.org (which is encrypted and also receives WhisperBack reports).

  This is not really working as tails-support-private@boum.org still has 12 times more traffic than tails-support@boum.org.

• Build a community of people doing user support outside of our team.

  This is not really working either as most of the threads are still answered by our help desk or other core contributors.

• Build a public database to make it easy to consult or reuse previous answers.

  This is not really working either as the archive of the mailing list are hard to search and reuse and it's easier to point people to the documentation, known issues, or FAQ.

Having a public mailing list also makes it:

• Complicated to make sure that both the list and the sender receive our answers.

• Sensitive to ask for more technical information about the problem, such as logs, as they are harder for the person reporting the error to share with us and also raises privacy concerns.

• Duplicate work between tails-support-private@boum.org and tails-support@boum.org as people often write to both.

The major downside of closing tails-support@boum.org is that it was a good place for developers to have some feedback on the recurrent problems faced by users. We want to solve this while working on a request tracker for our help desk.

See you on tails-support-private@boum.org!