In an effort to cull out some of the junk that is going into the permanent archives at RootsWeb, I wish to request a couple of things from all users of the Lists which I maintain. 1) Signatures at the end of your email should be no larger than 3 lines. I have seen some lately that are 2 pages in length, in fact much longer than the actual body of the message. Today I saw a reply that consisted of ONE line, with 18 lines of quoted text AND headers, and with a 35 line SIGNATURE !!!!! 2) Most of you use email browsers that give you the option of appending or not appending a signature to your email, and most of these browsers even give you the option of picking from a selection of signatures. I will not comment on your signatures to other places, BUT I would like to ask that you have a SHORT one that you use when sending to ANY Mailing List. Remember, all that extra stuff at the end is archived just like all the other data. All those fancy lines made of symbols and those historical quotes are just not appropriate for email to Mailing Lists 3) When you reply to a post, DELETE all but just enough of the original to identify the subject. We have all seen the original at least once and there is NO need to quote it again in its entirety. Again, when you quote an original, plus a reply, plus a reply to the reply, and then add your reply, all this junk (yes, at this point it is junk) ends up getting into the permanent Archives at RootsWeb. It is taking up far too much valuable space, space that could be better used for Census databases, for instance. 4) When you reply to a user, and your reply is strictly PERSONAL, send it to that user, NOT back to the List. Again, your personal chit-chat gets Archived too. As an example, today on one of my Lists a user sent an email asking another user where to find a book which had absolutely nothing to do with that List. 5) If any of you want to argue over this, and some always do, DO NOT send your reply back to the List. (Remember it will be permanently Archived.) Send to my private email address and I will gladly discuss it. Lets all try to keep these Lists, and the email to them, "lean and clean". Some of my Lists have only a few dozen users, while the largest two have over 600 and 1000, respectively. With hundreds of posts to these large ones, I hope you can see that we need to cut down on anything that is not absolutely essential. Thanks for listening, SgtGeorge Listowner