Mailing lists

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W3C hosts thousands of mailing lists and archives, many of them public, for the benefit of the web community at large. By providing this service, we hope to foster a highly responsive and interactive community for creating new ideas and advancing web technologies and culture.

Anyone with a valid email address can participate on a W3C public mailing list following the steps below.

General information

Each W3C mailing list has its own policies regarding who may post to the list. Those subscribed to a list are generally able to post directly to the list without delay; those who are not may be subject to manual moderation (at least the first time they post.)

First-time posters to our lists with public archives will need to give us permission to publish their message in our public archives using our archive approval system.

Each mailing list has a specific purpose; please try to avoid widely cross-posting to multiple lists, if possible.

Conference announcements are generally not welcome on W3C lists; if you feel a specific conference is of very high interest to the subscribers of a given list, you should write a custom message to that list, containing a very short summary with a pointer to more information.

Posting of Unsolicited Bulk E-mail (UBE), or spam is strictly forbidden.

Posts to our lists are generally not removed or edited, except in very rare circumstances. See our Archive Editing Policy for more information.

Subscribing and unsubscribing

Group participants are automatically subscribed to the relevant list(s) when joining the group(s), and unsubscribed when leaving.

Before subscribing to general discussion lists, please be sure you have read our mailing list policies and our code of ethics and professional conduct.

Subscribing manually

To subscribe to a W3C mailing list, for example www-talk, send "subscribe" in the subject of a message to the list name followed by -request at our domain, for example:

        To: www-talk-request@w3.org
        Subject: subscribe

You should receive an automated response with instructions on how to confirm your subscription request. Note that you will not get an acknowledgement if you are already subscribed.

Unsubscribing manually

To unsubscribe from a mailing list, for example www-talk, send "unsubscribe" in the Subject of a message to the list name followed by "-request" at our domain, for example www-talk-request@w3.org:

        To: www-talk-request@w3.org
        Subject: unsubscribe

To unsubscribe an email address other than your current address, specify the old address following unsubscribe in the Subject, for example:

        To: www-talk-request@w3.org
        Subject: unsubscribe old.address@example.org

In either case you should receive an autoreply with instructions on how to confirm your request.

Asking for help

All mailing list administrative requests, including asking for help, must be sent to a *-request address (per RFC2142), never to the list itself. For a mailing list named list-name@w3.org, the associated request address would be list-name-request@w3.org.

Guidelines and policies

Searching and referencing

An archive search tool is available.

It is frequently useful to refer to a message (e.g., from the body of an email or from a web page) using a URI to the message in the archive. In addition, you can use the message's own "message-id" and map it to the archive URI using the message-id mapping tool.

List archives

Posting policies

Spam prevention