Contributing to MailCleaner

MailCleaner Community Edition has long been a popular Open-Source email filtering solution. While the project is guided by the MailCleaner team, we are happy to accept contributions and feedback from whoever is gracious enough to help. Find more information below on how you can help make MailCleaner better.

Software License

Note that modifications and contributions to the project are bound by the terms of the GPLv3.

How to Contribute

Except for Translations, contribution should be made to this repository in the form of Issues and Pull Requests. Please read this article if you are new to making contributions via GitHub. Before opening either, we would ask that you search for existing and closed issues to see if they have been resolved or marked WONTFIX.

To open a Pull Request, you will need to fork the project, make changes to your fork and then use the Open Pull Request button within the GitHub WebUI to request that the changes be merged. Please ensure that you rebase your work on the latest changes from the master branch before opening the pull request.

Cautions when modifying the MailCleaner source (especially in production)

Given that the MailCleaner source code is licensed under the GPLv3, you can feel free to modify it to meet your needs so long as your changes are likewise made available.

However, please note that modifications can have a detrimental impact on a machine running in production. MailCleaner's Updater4MC script performs updates by pulling changes from the upstream MailCleaner repository. Changes to your local machine, or changing your origin repository to a different upstream can cause your machine to stop receiving updates.

For Enterprise Edition support you must not change any MailCleaner file without our agreement in order to maintain your warranty and support level assistance.

If you break MailCleaner code, your warranty will be void and our support time involved in restoring MailCleaner will be charged at the rate of $200 USD per hour.

Assistance via GitHub issues is provided on a best effort basis. If you show a good faith effort to provide valuable contributions to the source code, we will do our best to provide assistance in that effort. If you are working on unsupported boutique modifications, we may provide some assistance, but will generally recommend that you return to the default specifications.

Areas where we would appreciate your help

Alpha/Beta testing of upcoming major release

We are looking for tester of the upcoming major release, currently codenamed MailCleaner-Next. Check out that link for ways to contribute to that effort

Wiki Documentation

The Wiki for this repository could always use more work. It some guides are known to contain broken links (some even link to https://broken.link as a placeholder). Some pages contain [TODO]: <> (comments) with recommended enhancements already in place. Many could use screenshots to enhance their usability. The FAQs don't have enough Qs. Finally, all new topics on different production environments or use-cases are welcome!

Translations

If you want to contribute to a translation of MailCleaner, you can do so with Weblate.

PULL REQUESTS TRANSLATING THE INTERFACE IN THIS REPO WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED. YOU MUST USE WEBLATE

New features and bug fixes

Feel free to review the Issues and see if there is a feature or bug fix that you would like to work on. Please express your intention to do so within the issue before doing any work to make sure that our team has a chance to confirm that the feature is desired or the fix is needed and so that you don't end up duplicating effort. Feel free to suggest your own features and fixes if they have not already been discussed and ruled out.

Note that feature development for the current release of MailCleaner is largely frozen while we work on MailCleaner-Next. New features developed by our team will be added there and will likely not be backported. If you would like to add features to the current release, they will be considered, but we will not provide much help on these.