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Temporary Changes to ICANN’s Email List Subscription Service

12 October 2022
By Ashwin Rangan

ICANN's mailing list service allows members of the community to subscribe to any of hundreds of ICANN email lists using a web form. In recent months, bad actors started abusing the ICANN subscription forms to send people nuisance emails asking if they wished to subscribe to various email lists.

In response, ICANN disabled the subscription web form for a few weeks. But once the web form was re-enabled, the bad actors quickly returned. To prevent repeat incidents of abuse, we have once again disabled the form. We are now testing an upgraded version of the subscription service that will support CAPTCHA, among other improvements. CAPTCHA will help prevent bad actors from using the web form to send unsolicited subscription requests to any email address.

Switching to this upgraded service will take some time, and we expect the work to be completed in the first quarter of 2023. In the meantime, community members can still subscribe to ICANN lists via email.

How to Subscribe by Email

  1. Send an email request to the desired list by emailing LISTNAME-join@icann.org, but replace "LISTNAME" with the name of the desired list. List names are not case sensitive.
  2. You will receive an automated response with instructions to confirm your subscription request and complete the process.
  3. If you encounter any problems, contact the administrator named at the bottom of the list subscription page.

Thank you for your patience while we work to provide the community with an improved email subscription service.

Authors

Ashwin Rangan

Ashwin Rangan