Thanks for the kind words, Jim. As a result of feedback to my prior post on the topic sent to me by private email, and subsequent reading on the subject, I am going to revise my method. The issue is outgoing messages never making it to the match's inbox because it gets labeled as unwanted in advance by the email clients or other structures on the route. I will not go into examples at great length here because the interested reader will be able to search and find better articulated treatments of the topic elsewhere. But I will mention a few, just to get the idea across. The idea of capitalization. Orthodoxy in genealogy has historically been to put surnames in caps, so that people can find them quickly in text. And that is great. The problem is that all caps in a message triggers the filters. That is especially true for the subject line. So the autosomal that appears in the subject line of this message, while serving its purpose, is probably net negative for filtering. Use only plain text. Higher order, that is to say formats that go beyond plain text, have a tendency to set off filters. So I am still going to send my message out the same way, but I am going to convert it first to plain text first. I noted my surnames tables in the archives of this list looked okay, so I believe it will work. And in retrospect, there wasn't much gained by the shading of the text. Certain non-plain text elements are likely to trigger filter. These are tags that get interpreted by the email client as pictures or links. The email clients use them as code. The filters see them as bad. So that is another reason not to use them. Keywords should be avoided. Certain words just send the filters into a frenzy. You surely know what they are, because you see their unwanted selves in your messages. But if you don't, look online for worst words to send, and avoid those where possible in your emails. Abbreviations and certain like jargon should be avoided. If it is not a normal word to the filter, it should be avoided. This is because people who want their unwanted email to get through the filter will break up keywords with punctuation and other devices. The filters are aware of this, and if your text looks like that, even while innocent, then it may get tagged. Sender domain should have a good reputation. I have used yahoo mail for my messages. I would be better served by using my other email account I get from my cable company, which I have never used thus far. If I am sending out many messages at once from a yahoo account, the filters do not like that. Hopefully with these revisions I will get a better response rate. Gregg --- On Sun, 5/13/12, Jim Bartlett <[email protected]> wrote: From: Jim Bartlett <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AUTOSOMAL-DNA] Improving FF match email response rates To: "Gregg Bonner" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Date: Sunday, May 13, 2012, 10:57 PM Gregg A very well thought out process, designed to make it easy for our atMatches to easily recognize our Common Ancestor. I use a similar process and have about a 75 percent (eventual) response rate with Family Finder, but only about 30 percent with Relative Finder. By far, the FF matches are more serious about genealogy. I like to include a Patriarch if I feel that most genealogists will recognize him - the aha! factor is very powerful - if someone sees their ancestor on my list, they will respond quickly. I think it is imperative to include at least as many of your 512 ancestors as you can. Between FF & RF I have over 1,300 matches. I'm using those to map segments on my chromosome. I estimate about 200-250 segments per parent, or 400-500 total. Although some ancestors will provide more than 1 segment, it seems many of the 512-level ancestors (8th cousins) will show up. If you have some sticky segments that tend to last for extra generations, it could come from a generation or two further back. As a further check of this, you probably have about 1600cM from each parent. Dividing by 7.7cM (for the FF cutoff) you get about 200 such segments, or 400 for both parents. You'd need at least some 8th cousins for these segments. Thanks again for outlining a great process. Jim