6. If you are having problems

Most PRs go through the system and are accepted quickly; however, at times GNATS runs behind and you may not get your email confirmation for 10 minutes or even longer. Please try to be patient.

In addition, because GNATS receives all its input via email, it is absolutely vital that FreeBSD runs all its submissions through spam filters. If you do not get a response within an hour or two, you may have fallen afoul of them; if so, please contact the GNATS administrators at and ask for help.

Note: Among the anti-spam measures is one that weighs against many common abuses seen in HTML-based email (although not necessarily the mere inclusion of HTML in a PR). We strongly recommend against the use of HTML-based email when sending PRs: not only is it more likely to fall afoul of the filters, it also tends to merely clutter up the database. Plain old email is strongly preferred.

On rare occasions you will encounter a GNATS bug where a PR is accepted and assigned a tracking number but it does not show up on the list of PRs on any of the web query pages. What may have happened is that the database index has gotten out of synchronization with the database itself. The way that you can test whether this has happened is to pull up the view a single PR page and see whether the PR shows up. If it does, please notify the GNATS administrators at . Note that there is a cron job that periodically rebuilds the database, so unless you are in a hurry, no action needs to be taken.