Getting in touch with the developers of the IPFire distribution is not always that easy. It depends a lot on the topic you are reaching out and what your goal is. This is mainly because of a simple thing:

Developers are busy

They receive lots of emails a day with all sorts of things they need to take care of. They also have day jobs. So please at all times avoid sending emails directly to any developer at any time unless they ask you to. There is almost never a reason to send private emails.

This will also often delay getting a response when you get stuck in someone's inbox.

"Default to open"

The best approach is always to contact someone what we call "in the open". There is a detailed blog post about the whole topic. Here is the essence of it:

Send emails to lists

Instead of sending personal emails, please send them to the right mailing list. You will find there a group of people who are able to reply which will give you a quick reply and your conversation will be archived so that people can find it if they have the same question.

File a bug report

If you have found a bug in the software, please file a ticket. Tickets are great to keep track of the status of an issue and they can quickly be assigned to the person who is best taking care of it.

The bug tracker simply exists to track bugs. If you have a feature request, or would like to implement any features, please start a conversation about that before you start coding on the development mailing list.

Never make a public conversation private

Never reply to an email on a mailing list or a bug report in private. You will probably just be ignored.

Even if you have a security-related bug that you want to report, you can do this on the bug tracker by marking it as such.

Meeting in person

You can meet us in person at our annual IPFire Developer Summit or some other events that we visit.