Hi everyone, Below are two topics I had meant to cover in yesterday's Sunday Morning Coffee, however just didn't have the time to. ANCESTRY.COM Have you been having trouble getting through to ancestry.com the past several days? Are you being told it's been removed from the Web? Well, it hasn't. Nor is it just an AOL problem like many people are thinking. Ancestry is experiencing a network problem. There are major servers that are down between some hubs and Ancestry. One of those hubs is AOL. This explanation from someone on another list might help explain the problem a little better: "Basically, the problem is a DNS issue. When you access a Web page you type in something like: http://www.ancestry.com/ and expect your browser to take you to that page--and it usually does just that. But a Web page is really not an address as simple as http://www.ancestry.com/ It is actually located by means of a series of numbers called an IP address. A Domain Name Server (DNS) is used to translate the numbers into a usable address such as ancestry.com. At the present time Ancestry's DNS is not resolving correctly for many Interner Service Providers. The problem started for some users (primarily AOL users) late yesterday afternoon and seems to have spread to quite a few others today." (This message was written on Saturday, 1 Sep) If you'll go to Rootsweb's helpdesk page <http://helpdesk.rootsweb.com/help.cgi> you'll see the following message at the top of the page in red: "ACCESS PROBLEMS: Some users may not be able to reach our message boards or the Ancestry.com site. The problem has been resolved, but it may take a couple of days until the changes have propagated to all service providers. We apologize for the inconvenience, and appreciate your patience." Another route people are having success with is using Ancestry's IP address <http://216.10.103.21>. PREVENTING E-MAIL VIRUSES The following comes from another list. Because of the whopping load of messages I receive, I'm trying it myself. I don't know if it works, but hey ... it's sure worth a try! :) "...Along the lines of preventing virii from sending mail to all the addresses in your address book as Outlook Express is highly vulnerable of doing: To avoid spreading computer viruses, create a contact in your email address book with the name :** !0000 with no email address in the details. This contact will then show up as your first contact. If a virus attempts to do a "send all" on your contact list, your pc will put up an error message saying that: "The Message could not be sent. One or more recipients do not have an e-mail address. Please check your Address Book and make sure all the recipients have a valid e-mail address." Your messages to an individual or individual addressees will not be affected. You click on OK and the offending (virus) message would not have been sent to anyone. Of course no changes have been made to your original contacts list. The offending (virus) message may then be automatically stored in your "Drafts" or "Outbox" folder. Go in there and delete the offending message. Problem is solved and virus is not spread. Try this and pass on to your email contacts. The more people that use this technique, the less vulnerable we will be to viruses that spread in this manner!" That's it, cousins. I wish you all a mystical, magical, MAGNIFICENT Monday! :) Colleen