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 each 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

Once you have chosen a list (say, "example@w3.org"), to subscribe send a message to example-request@w3.org with the subject line "subscribe" (the body can be empty). An automated system will require you to confirm your subscription request, to prevent unauthorized subscriptions.

To unsubscribe from example@w3.org, send a message to example-request@w3.org with the subject line "unsubscribe" (the body can be empty).

Further information on subscription administration is available.

Guidelines and policies

• W3C Spam Policy
  How we define spam, what we do about it, and why.
• W3C Positive Work Environment and Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct
  W3C's policies for appropriate behavior on our mailing lists.
• W3C email forgery prevention using SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
  Information on our use of SPF to block forged email and prevent email forgeries in our name.
• W3C Guidelines for Email Attachment Formats
  Guidelines on email attachments that are submitted to W3C lists.
• Policy on Subject tagging
  Rationale for not adding tags to the subjects of our lists.
• W3C Archive Editing Policy
  W3C policy on editing/removing posts in online archives.
• Email address obfuscation
  Some notes on the amount of email address obfuscation performed on messages in W3C's list archives.

Searching and Referencing

An archive search tool is available.

It is frequently useful to refer to a message (say, 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.