OK folks, RootsWeb has finally got the Archives access working via their Web Site. What this means, is that you no longer have to bother with those troublesome and complicated "X-Commands", via email, to retrieve past messages from any List from the Archives. All you have to do is logon to RootsWeb and navigate to the appropriate List. From there you just go to the particular year and month you are interested in and look at all the messages for that month. You will see a list with the subject line of each. The address for the Archives is: http://searches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/listsearch.pl Just follow the prompts and navigate to wherever you want to go. All past months' Archives are not up yet, but will be added as the folks at RootsWeb have the time. Also, eventually, all the messages from our Lists at MAISER (before the "big crash") will be added as well. The Archives contain all the "trash", "flames", "spam", etc., that were originally posted to the Lists. There is no way to weed out these things from the Archives, and, personally, I think they belong there. After all, Archives, by the very name, imply that ALL the historical data is included there. If you've ever sent a nasty note or argued with someone on the Lists, your email is there. Maybe this will be a lesson for all that when you have something to say that should remain private, you shouldn't post it to the List for everyone to read. There is absolutely no need to worry about unscrupulous persons gaining email addresses for SPAM mailing lists from these Archives. The reason they CAN'T get your email address is technical, but the automatic search programs these lowlifes use cannot navigate through the different levels of pages that would be necessary for them to get email addresses from Archives at RootsWeb. In order for anyone to get a list of email addresses from the Archives, a human would have to logon to the search page and look at each and every email message there. If anyone is that dedicated to the purpose of amassing addresses, he/she could just as easily do the same thing by subscribing to the Lists and copying the email addresses of every poster. It's just not something that anyone would spend the time doing. Anyway, the Archives are there -- drop by the site if you want to see what has been sent in the past. This is especially helpful for new subscribers that want to see what discussions have occurred. Just one other word -- you will find out very soon that using APPROPRIATE Subject lines in your messages is very, very important. AND, when you reply to a post and change subjects, you MUST type in a new Subject line. You will run across many, many messages with Subject lines that are so useless that you have no idea what is being discussed. If this aggravates you, good! It will make you more aware of the importance of using "good" Subject lines. Regards, SgtGeorge List Administrator P.S. I included SURNAME-QUERY as a CC: recipient, since I figured you subscribers could use the info also. ==== DURMAN Mailing List ==== To unsubscribe from DURMAN, send an e-mail message to: DURMAN-L-request@rootsweb.com (for individual messages) DURMAN-D-request@rootsweb.com (for Digest mode) Subject: unsubscribe In the body include only one word: unsubscribe (Turn OFF your signature file when sending this command)