W3C Mailing List Administrivia

General usage

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. For example:

Options

Acceptable options for interacting with the listname-request@w3.org Subject header: are discussed below.

subscribe

Subscribe to the list. If you want to subscribe under a different address, use a Reply-To header in the message. Also, be sure you have read our policy for public mailing lists and our Guidelines for Email Attachment Formats before subscribing.
Example:

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

Note that you will not get an acknowledgement if you are already subscribed.

Also note that W3C mailing lists do not currently support a digest mode. RSS feeds are available, however.

unsubscribe

Unsubscribe from the list. This can be done from an address different from the one with which you subscribed.
Example:

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

or

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

Most (un)subscription requests are processed automatically without human intervention. Do not send multiple (un)subscription or info requests in one mail. Only one will be processed per mail.

help

Get information about the mailing list.

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); the *-request server does not react to replies.

Changing Address

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).