Hello List, RootsWeb announced a few days ago that all of their mailing lists would become inactive (i.e. defunct) from 2nd March 2020. This announcement was made to subscribers to the Listowners List to which (luckily!) I subscribe, and nowhere else. After much research and deliberation I have decided to set up an identical list on groups.io, with the same remit and operating conditions. The relevant email addresses appear at the end of this message, and I invite all current members of the list to join it on the new platform using the "subscribe" address. Please note that this set up is new to me (though I don't doubt many of you will be familiar with it) and I am on a steep learning curve with the management tools. The initial settings which I have chosen require me to approve new subscribers, so if (as I hope) the majority of you decide to join me on the "other side" there may be a small delay because I may have some large batches of individual approvals to send. It will be a formality for all of you, though the small number of moderated members of the list will continue to be moderated. Also,I have set the list to require my approval for your first two messages. This is to weed out any troublemakers who try to sneak in for the purposes of posting spam messages (you wouldn't believe how many of those I have to deal with behind the scenes) so at least for the time being there may be short delay before your first messages appear. After that it will be business as usual. Please note that (at least for the time being) the Message Boards will continue to operate as normal, and the list archives will still be searchable. With that in mind I encourage you to do something which I have hitherto strongly discouraged: send a message to the list showing all of the Dorset-related surnames in which you are interested, so that people searching the archives in the future will be able to contact you. Because RootsWeb strip out email addresses before putting messages into the archives, you will need to put your email address in a cryptic format at the end. Something like "yourname AT provider DOT com" should do the trick. Here are the addresses as promised: Post: [email protected] Subscribe: [email protected] Unsubscribe: [email protected] Group Owner: [email protected] Help: [email protected] I hope to see you all soon! Regards Davy Cannon Dorchester, Dorset List Admin, Dorset List