Unicode® Email Distribution Lists

The Unicode Consortium hosts a number of email distribution lists, some of which are open to members and non-members alike. Some of the public lists are hosted directly on the corp.unicode.org subdomain, some are Google Groups, while others are hosted on the ICU Project website. Everyone is welcome to join the public email lists below to pose questions to the community of Unicode and ICU users. To prevent problems with spam, you must first subscribe to a list to post messages to it.

Links in the table below will take you to web pages with details about particular mail lists, including information about subscribing and unsubscribing.

List Name	Brief Description
unicode@corp.unicode.org	Public discussion list for The Unicode Standard and general internationalization issues
cldr-users@unicode.org	Public discussion list for internationalization issues related to locales, including in particular the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR)
ICU Contacts and Mail Lists	Discussion / mail lists for the ICU project, hosted on the ICU Project website.

Users may wish to adjust any mail filters appropriately and check spam folders to confirm subscriptions.

As a courtesy to others on the list, please check the following relevant pages before posting your questions. These useful pages contain answers to many common questions:

Frequently asked questions
Where is my character?
Versions of the Unicode Standard
Unicode Technical Reports
Unicode Resources

Public Email List Self-Subscribe and Posting

On the pages for each of the public mail lists mentioned above are some instructions and pages for subscribing and un-subscribing.

To send messages to a list:
1. You must subscribe to the list 
2. You must send your messages from the address with which you subscribed.

The mail lists are closed to outside posting, to prevent problems with spam.

Note: Initial subscriptions are added in the moderated state, and after the subscriber's first message is submitted, moderation is removed. This form of moderation is temporary and prevents unsolicited automated mail from reaching the list. Because of this, your first message to a mail list may take some time to be posted, usually no more than a day.

List Activity and Archives

The lists have occasional lulls during which only a message or two per day might be posted, but have also been subject to heavy periods where more than twenty messages per day will be exchanged. Subscribers should be prepared for both circumstances. In general, you can expect to see 5 to 10 messages per day on the Unicode list, fewer on the CLDR Users list and other lists.

Subscribers should know that our public mail lists might be archived and indexed by third parties, who are themselves subscribers to our lists, and made available on their websites. Because our public lists are publicly accessible, they are under no obligation to inform us about what they are doing. The Consortium has no control over such practices and is not responsible for them. Questions or concerns regarding them must be taken up with the administrators of those websites. Some such sites may offer additional features such as news feeds or aggregate pages created from the list archives, which may be attractive to some of our subscribers.

As a community resource, the some lists also serves the social function of keeping people with similar interests in touch with one another. Searchable on-line archives of the unicode@unicode.org list are available back to 1997. See the related links in the left column of the individual mail list pages for details of that, and archives for other lists. You are not required to join the list to search archives.

Mail List Rules and Etiquette

These mail lists are open for technical discussion of the Unicode Standard, related technical reports and technical standards, as well as related internationalization or encoding standards, locales, writing systems, and cultural phenomena.

Discussion on the lists are free-ranging, with some specific exceptions: job postings or recruitment campaigns and direct product advertising are strictly forbidden on all of our mail lists. Posting such items may result in immediate removal from the list. (Some posting of new-product announcements is encouraged, however please avoid discussion of prices and contact the office to clear your brief message before posting.) The lists should also not be used to post comments on ISO national body voting positions, or to make claims purporting to be national body positions on ballots.

The maximum allowed size of messages may vary by list, but is generally limited to 100,000 bytes for most lists. If you need to send large documents or images, please post them on the web and send the URL to the list.

Subscribers to the lists should remain tolerably polite at all times and consider carefully before joining heated discussions. Certain activities are discouraged, including the use of profanity, overuse of bandwidth, product spam, frequent off-topic posts, and protracted arguments that get personal. In extreme instances, postings may be moderated or refused, or warnings may be issued by our administrative staff. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, at any time, for any reason or no reason. Your subscription may be moderated or terminated at any time without notice. Posting to the list is not a guarantee of delivery.

For the complete text of our policies, please see the Mail List Policies page.

Commercial Mail

Unsolicited commercial and bulk email, commonly called spam, is not welcome on any Unicode Consortium email list. The Consortium policy is to investigate and report all instances of spam to the domains and machines through which it appears to have been routed, and to cooperate in investigations undertaken by other mail administrators for the purposes of curtailing such bulk mailing practices. We reserve the right to unilaterally deny email access and relaying from any user or domain for any reason or no reason, without notice.

Unicode Members Email Lists

The Unicode Consortium also supports private email lists for the use of its members and various committees. These email discussion lists are the first line of discussion in the development, implementation, enhancement and support of the Unicode Standard and related globalization standards. Subscription to these lists is one of the benefits of membership in the Unicode Consortium. For more information, read about Unicode Membership or contact the Unicode office.

Unicode Consortium Email Announcements

From time to time, the Unicode Consortium sends official announcements. These include notification of such things as Public Review Issues, new versions of the Unicode Standard, Unicode CLDR releases, and significant changes in policies. Everyone who subscribes to one of the public mail lists above, or who is a Unicode member, or is on one of our private lists will automatically receive these official announcements. If you do not wish to receive official announcements, you will need to unsubscribe from all of our lists.

All of the Unicode Consortium's email lists are strictly opt-in lists for members or interested users of our standards, and we make every effort to promptly remove users who do not wish to receive email from us. If you are on one or more of the public mail lists discussed above, you can remove yourself from the list by following the instructions for unsubscribing from that list. If you have any trouble with that procedure, please contact us via our online reporting form and we will assist you. If you are only on one of our private email lists, you may contact the list moderator, or contact us as above.

Notification Services

Major publication and website changes are announced to subscribers of each of the public lists. However, there are many documents or pages that different people may be interested in, and not all changes in those pages are announced. If you are interested in monitoring particular pages, we suggest web services that will send you email when particular pages change. One such service is http://www.watchthatpage.com

For example, if you are interested in new technical reports or updates to existing technical reports, you can have such a service monitor the page www.unicode.org/reports/. (Note that the Unicode consortium does not endorse these particular services, they are merely supplied as examples.)

Notes

• If you experience difficulty with subscription or un-subscription, please contact the Unicode office
• The list of subscribers is not available, so please do not ask.
• Multiple addresses: Many people these days have multiple email addresses. If you wish to post messages from more than one address, then subscribe all of your addresses to the list and set vacation mode on the addresses that you wish to NOT receive postings.
• Subdomains: If you subscribed with an address in one sub-domain of your main domain, you may also send messages from the main domain. For purposes of subscription and un-subscription, the sub-domain addresses are acceptable as well, and the unsubscribe command works from the main or sub-domain addresses.

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