Hey folks, I am continuing to enjoy reading your messages and following your discussions on MOBILE BAY AREA ROOTS. I have some information that you need to read and take to heart as you participate. It will make the experience easier on all of us. This information will be in several emails, so please be patient and pay attention. ABOUT MAILING LISTS Mailing lists are remarkably simple beasties -- you send a piece of e-mail to the list's address, and the list retransmits that message to everyone who is subscribed. The current REPLY setting for MOBILE BAY AREA ROOTS is "reply-to-list" which means that when you hit the reply button on your email software, your reply email is gonna be sent TO THE LIST. If you want to send the reply to a particular person, you must substitute their email address in the TO: field of your email. In my view (and I'm the one that has to make these decisions), I LIKE "reply-to-list" because it causes your responses to go through the list and they are, therefore, archived on Rootsweb so that future researchers can hopefully make a connection to the information that you are posting. HOWEVER, once your conversation with someone turns "chatty", you should be sure to send those types of messages directly to the person. ALL LISTS HAVE TWO ADDRESSES Every mailing list has TWO addresses -- the list name, where posts should be sent, and the list name followed by -request, where commands to the listserver software should be sent. For example, posts to MOBILE BAY AREA ROOTS should go to [email protected] while "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests should go to [email protected] (for list mode) or to [email protected] (for digest mode). LIST MODES AFFECT HOW YOU RECEIVE POSTS MAIL MODE is where every post sent to the list is resent to subscribers as a separate piece of e-mail. DIGEST MODE is where several posts are batched together and then sent to the subscribers bundled together in one email. Digests produce less clutter in your mailbox, BUT replying to an individual message requires a little extra effort. You have to remember to change the subject line in your reply email and if your email software quotes the text of the original message in your reply, you have to delete all the text that is not germane to your reply (which can be substantial). ... more to come... -- Regards, Kevin Sellew in Mobile, Alabama Listowner of MOBILE BAY AREA ROOTS [AL-MOBILEBAY]