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This is a guide to providing feedback to the PuTTY development team. It is provided as both a web page on the PuTTY site, and an appendix in the PuTTY manual.
Section B.1 gives some general guidelines for sending any kind of e-mail to the development team. Following sections give more specific guidelines for particular types of e-mail, such as bug reports and feature requests.
The PuTTY development team gets a lot of mail. If you can possibly solve your own problem by reading the manual, reading the FAQ, reading the web site, asking a fellow user, perhaps posting to a newsgroup (see section B.1.2), or some other means, then it would make our lives much easier.
We get so much e-mail that we literally do not have time to answer it all. We regret this, but there's nothing we can do about it. So if you can possibly avoid sending mail to the PuTTY team, we recommend you do so. In particular, support requests (section B.5) are probably better sent to newsgroups, or passed to a local expert if possible.
The PuTTY contact email address is a private mailing list containing four or five core developers. Don't be put off by it being a mailing list: if you need to send confidential data as part of a bug report, you can trust the people on the list to respect that confidence. Also, the archives aren't publicly available, so you shouldn't be letting yourself in for any spam by sending us mail.
Please use a meaningful subject line on your message. We get a lot of mail, and it's hard to find the message we're looking for if they all have subject lines like ‘PuTTY bug’.
Since the PuTTY contact address is a mailing list, e-mails larger than 40Kb will be held for inspection by the list administrator, and will not be allowed through unless they really appear to be worth their large size.
If you are considering sending any kind of large data file to the PuTTY team, it's almost always a bad idea, or at the very least it would be better to ask us first whether we actually need the file. Alternatively, you could put the file on a web site and just send us the URL; that way, we don't have to download it unless we decide we actually need it, and only one of us needs to download it instead of it being automatically copied to all the developers.
Some people like to send mail in MS Word format. Please don't send us bug reports, or any other mail, as a Word document. Word documents are roughly fifty times larger than writing the same report in plain text. In addition, most of the PuTTY team read their e-mail on Unix machines, so copying the file to a Windows box to run Word is very inconvenient. Not only that, but several of us don't even have a copy of Word!
Some people like to send us screen shots when demonstrating a problem. Please don't do this without checking with us first - we almost never actually need the information in the screen shot. Sending a screen shot of an error box is almost certainly unnecessary when you could just tell us in plain text what the error was. (On some versions of Windows, pressing Ctrl-C when the error box is displayed will copy the text of the message to the clipboard.) Sending a full-screen shot is occasionally useful, but it's probably still wise to check whether we need it before sending it.
If you must mail a screen shot, don't send it as a .BMP file. BMPs have no compression and they are much larger than other image formats such as PNG, TIFF and GIF. Convert the file to a properly compressed image format before sending it.
Please don't mail us executables, at all. Our mail server blocks all incoming e-mail containing executables, as a defence against the vteadanswer questions directly relating to the interaction of PuTTY with your particular environment. If your users mail us directly, we won't be able to give them very much help about things specific to your own setup.
No, it isn't. PuTTY is almost completely composed of code written from scratch for PuTTY. The only code we share with OpenSSH is the detector for SSH-1 CRC compensation attacks, written by CORE SDI S.A.
You're looking at the wrong web site; the only PuTTY we know about here is the name of a computer program.
If you want the kind of putty you can buy as an executive toy, the PuTTY team can personally recommend Thinking Putty, which you can buy from Crazy Aaron's Putty World, at www.puttyworld.com.
It's the name of a popular SSH and Telnet client. Any other meaning is in the eye of the beholder. It's been rumoured that ‘PuTTY’ is the antonym of ‘getty’, or that it's the stuff that makes your Windows useful, or that it's a kind of plutonium Teletype. We couldn't possibly comment on such allegations.
Exactly like the English word ‘putty’, which we pronounce /ˈpʌtɪ/.
If you want to provide feedback on this manual or on the PuTTY tools themselves, see the Feedback page.
[PuTTY release 0.58]