Hi all. It was just brought to my attention by a list member that some of the email that is gatewayed from the message boards were from addresses that don't exist. Unfortunately, I haven't been watching the lists close enough and those messages slipped past me. It's not that the addresses from the senders don't work, it's that the messages were actually spam. Because messages posted on the message boards are automatically gatewayed the the corresponding lists, there is nothing I can do about them. These spam messages are usually detected by the message board moderator and then deleted, but by that time, they've already come through on the lists. My suggestion is that if you see a message that you are interested in that has been gatewayed, click on the link that takes you directly to the message board. If a screen comes up with the message, you can be pretty sure it's legitimiate, however if a screen comes up saying the message doesn't exist, it was most likely spam that was deleted. A word of caution, a lot of these messages that are really spam have a link inside the message that takes you to another site (such as ebay, etc.). For most of the lists I moderate, it's not really a problem, maybe only a dozen messages a so a year are gatewayed, but for the Black, Barringer, and Bradford lists, the majority of messages seem to be gatewayed. I believe these gatewayed messages are valuable to the list members as a whole, there are just a few bad seeds, but unfortunately there is nothing I can do about the bad seeds. Good luck all with your research. Erin Erin Bradford eabradfo@yahoo.com List manager http://www.ncalhn.org ALHN County Coordinator for multiple NC Counties http://www.gendepository.com (the Genealogy Depository-Barringer, Black, Bradford, Coventry, Eller, Hackett, Hupp, and Kern)