Welcome to Elizabeth Stafford, "drewmac", Nathan Mitchinson, Peter Fleming, Irene Popkins and Elizabeth Revell who have joined this week. If you haven't already contributed, we hope to hear from you soon. ****** ****** ****** One of the problems with e-mailing is the "bounced" message. For list owners this could be a problem, however RootsWeb monitors bounced messages, and automatically unsubscribes the offending address after a set number of bounces. For my lists, I have accepted the RootsWeb default which is four. For Digest subscribers, this means there are about four days to clear the full mail box before cut off occurs. For List subscribers, time to cut off will depend on the volume of mail. For this list, since the Query board was "gatewayed", this means at most two days. NB because the mail is bouncing RootsWeb DOES NOT bother to send an unsubscribe message, as it too would bounce. There may be one exception to the bounce count rule, and that is where there is a bulk ISP bounce - if there is a combined error message RootsWeb's software apparently does not count that bounce. Also in these cases, I can usually forward the bounced message within 24 hours as no ISP likes to have it's service down for too long. Where there is an ISP bounce but each individual address generates a bounce message the normal rule applies. Once a subscriber realises that the flow of mail has dried up, the quickest way to check the situation is to resubscribe in the same mode - if the address has been bounced off, it will be reinstated, if not, RootsWeb will send an "already a subscriber" message. DO NOT send "There doesn't seem to be any mail" messages to the list, as the only people who can fix the problem are the subscriber and/or the list owner / maintainer. The slower way is to send a message to [email protected], and ask me to check the subscription. This will be actioned within 24 hours [ or 36 hours Sunday/Monday], as I generally only download mail once daily (at around 1000 hrs GMT but Sundays is around 0300 hrs GMT). To find whether you have missed anything on your research interests while the bouncing has been going on, go to the list archive search at http://searches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/listsearch.pl Enter the name of the list - in this case ButeshireGenWeb-L, then enter your search data at the next screen, you will have to choose a year, logically at present 2000. ****** ****** ****** Feel free to join in and present your own items. Peter Cook [email protected] Western Australia List owner and Co-host with Barbara < [email protected] > of the ButeshireGenWeb mailing list. List owner of the SCT-RENFREW and SCT-ARGYLL mailing lists.