I, as well as many others, have some super spam filters now so it is even more important that you put something that indicates a real person you are researching in the subject section of your message. Spammers daily pick our email addresses off the many genealogical sites where it has appeared. So, if you are sending me or anyone else a genealogical one that says, "need help" "looking for" or other non-descriptive terms is bound to be deleted without being read. If you are looking for an ancestor named John Gardner, put his name in the subject line. If you are looking for information about Waterloo, IA ancestors in 1850 and you don't really know the correct names you are looking for, put Gardners in IA 1850s or perhaps Iowa 1850s or something similar. I would immediately recognize it as a genealogical query and your message would not be deleted. I have three spam filters. The messages are diverted to a special site where all I do is look at the subject matter and the sender's name, but only when it is one I know is in my family. These filters divert from 30-70 messages a day. In the folder it only takes me a couple minutes to go through them. If the person sending the message has paid attention to the message they received and followed the instructions about my spam filter, the message has already hit my mailbox. But if it worries them or they do nothing it is in the spam filter folder and I might not recognize it unless it clearly looks like a query from a person I have not heard from before or recently. Since I maintain databases with nearly 50,000 names and have been doing research for over 40 years, I can sometimes be a gold mine for people. But first they have to get to me with a message that I can recognize as a query. Thanks for your help. I have received so much help from people on both of these lists and I know many others have too. Bette