I guess I should have been monitoring the list more the past month or two but my husband had what the Doctors called a "mini" stroke and my attention was needed elsewhere. In all the time I have had this list, we've NEVER EVER had a flame war or disagreement on it. This incident was minor but I don't think the original poster meant any harm by asking that the "extra" data or "garbage" (I call it debris, but it means the same thing) be removed from posts back from the list. Many of us receive literally hundreds of emails per day--having to wade through things we have already read keeps us from getting to the "goodies". For this reason we subscribe to the "DIGEST" mode. I for example am responsible for a whopping 15 different websites and 3 mailing lists, plus subscribe to 4 additional lists. If EACH of these generates 10 messages per day, I have now over 200 emails per day hitting my box, not counting any responses to queries, letters from friends and family, etc. By getting each list in DIGEST, it cuts down the number of individual emails to be waded through, making it a LITTLE more managable. Those who get the list as individual messages may not understand what a "Digest" version is ---the "Digest" takes a group of messages and sends them all as one little email "booklet". At the top of the message, those in digest see something like this: LHENRY-D Digest Volume 00 : Issue 180 Today's Topics: #1 [ILHENRY-L] Mary XYZ Jones [[email protected]] #2 [ILHENRY-L] Re: cut and paste [[email protected]] #3 Re: [ILHENRY-L] Re: cut and paste [[email protected]] #4 Re: [ILHENRY-L] Re: cut and paste [lovely <[email protected]>] #5 Re: [ILHENRY-L] Re: cut and paste [[email protected] ] #6 Re: [ILHENRY-L] Re: ILHENRY-D Dige [[email protected]] That way the busy reader can select which messages, based upon topic, they wish to read while skipping over those items not pertaining to their research. Telling someone in Digest mode to "use their delete key" means they would lose ALL the message contained in the digest, not just those they don't want to read. Following the heading the Digest subscribers get (shown above) are the actual messages, in the order they are listed on the "index" shown above" If each of the people posting one of the messages listed in the index quotes the intire set of messages BACK, in the next digest instead of having 6 messages you would then have the original 6 messages x 6, or 36 REPEATED messages, plus the 6 new responses. Thus the DIGEST reader has to wade through the quotations of 36 OLD messages they already read to find the 6 new responses. Instead of hitting reply and copying the entire previously posted group of messages back, one needs to delete or remove anything quoted which does NOT relate to the new message they are posting. If you don't, the next digest will be HUGE but full of OLD messages, making it very hard to skim through and find the NEW ones among the quotes. Now, look back at the index again, you can see one person posting about Mary XYZ Jones, three discussing Cut and Past and one whom we have NO IDEA what they are discussing because they did not enter a real subject line--we already KNOW it is the ILHENRY list. Thus a digest reader not interested in Mary Jones or Cut and paste COULD hit delete except for one thing--they don't know what [email protected] was posting about--so they have to go to the message to see if it IS or IS NOT something they need to know about. Had [email protected] posted Re: Kewanee Cemetery instead of Re: ILHENRY-D Digest", the person could immediately decide "my family is from Kewanee, I might need this info" and go to read it, or decide "my family was all from Bishop Hill, I don't have a need for Kewanee Cemetery" and THEN delete the entire digest. See how this works folks?? Now that I've gone through this I hope we won't have any more problems on the list...this was the first one and PLEASE make it the last. Thanks ye ole list owner