In the past few days, most surname lists at Rootsweb.com (administered under Ancestry) have been the target of an overwhelming number of spam and/or phishing messages (this morning alone I acted to remove 80 messages aimed at a single list). As of this morning, all of the lists I administer have been placed on moderation, which requires administrator approval before messages are sent to the list. I am taking this action while Rootsweb volunteers are attempting to handle this problem. I have requested that the archives be purged of any offending messages sent to the list. Please be very careful about acting on the content of any message. If it doesn't seem legitimate to you, or is not related to family history research, it is probably spam and or an attempt to gain access to personal information. Do not click on any link in any e-mail message you receive unless you trust the sender. As a list administrator, I try to avoid sending messages containing a link. If I do, I clearly indicate the purpose of the link, and a way to obtain information without clicking the link. Usually this will be advice to enter a link directly in the address bar of your browser within clicking the link in the email. Hopefully our list traffic will return to its peaceful status (only a few messages per week) shortly, and we can return to un-moderated messaging traffic. In the meantime, if you have any questions about this, please send me a message off list to my gmail address listed. Doug Detling