W3C welcomes participation in W3C work through its many mailing lists. See below for information about:

General Information

All mailing list administrative requests 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.

The following are examples of how to determine the request form of a list:

Subscribing

If you are participating in a Community Group, Working Group or similar group, you will be subscribed to the relevant list(s) automatically when you join the group.

Otherwise, for general discussion lists that allow subscription you should be able to join using an automated email command interface described below.

Before subscribing, please be sure you have read our Mailing list policies including our Code of ethics and professional conduct.

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

If you are participating in a Community Group, Working Group or similar group, you will need to leave the group in order to be unsubscribed from the relevant list(s).

Otherwise, for general discussion lists you should be able to unsubscribe using the automated email command interface described below.

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

The *-request server usually does quite a good job in discriminating between (un)subscribe requests and messages intended for the maintainer. If you for some reason would like to make sure a human reads your message, make it look like a reply (i.e. the first word in the "Subject:" field should be "Re:", without the quotes of course), and our system will forward your message to the list maintainer instead of processing it as an automated request.

Address Changes

In the event of an address change, first send an unsubscribe for the old address (this can be done from the new address), and then a new subscribe from the new address (the order is important).