W3C hosts hundreds 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.
The following documents, as complements to this document, constitute the core policies and practices for using the W3C mailing lists and archives. All users of the W3C lists and archives should be familiar with this collection of documents :
Anyone with a valid email address can subscribe to these lists. Messages that are on-topic for the list are accepted from anyone. In order to make this service work to everybody's benefit there are some important ground rules that you as a user must follow:
Each mailing list has its own purpose: some are for general discussions like <www-talk@w3.org>, others are for more specific topics like fonts and HTML. In order to keep the noise level on the mailing lists low and the quality high, it is very important that you carefully read the purpose of each mailing lists and select one list only for your mail. Do not cross post to multiple mailing lists.
Please note: As of September 2002, W3C has implemented an archive approval system. This has been done to ensure that all participants of W3C lists are made aware that messages distributed to our lists will be made available in our online archives, forever.
Do not under any circumstance post spam to the W3C mailing lists.
Bulk distribution of unsolicited bulk e-mail (often called spam mail) is extremely impolite to the participants of a mailing list, and possibly illegal.
As the fora hosted at W3C are focused primarily on technical, operational, or communications issues, any bulk, irrelevant e-mail is likely to be interpreted as spam.
Violators of this restriction may be permanently unsubscribed from all lists and banned from participation in any W3C-hosted discussion form. Their posts may be removed and stored for further actions.
Posts made to W3C fora are Public unless noted otherwise. When posts are made to any mailing list (Public, Member, or Team) they are immediately distributed to all subscribers of the list, and archived.
Due to the nature of the archives, as a permanent chronicle of e-mail communications within W3C Activities and functions, posts are not removed or edited.
Please review the Archive Editing Policy for specifics on this matter.
It is the responsibility of each list user to exercise informed caution when posting to W3C lists.