No Ralph. it isn't necessary, nor is it desireable. It's just that a sizeable group in every maillist isn't fully computer knowledgeable so they use the pre-sets or defaults that came with their computer. Nothing wrong with that of course, but a few changes can make it much easier for the rest of us. I use IE 4.0 for my mail, but most mail programs are about the same. To make a change in your default settings to the following: Go into your mail program. For IE I click on "Tools", get a dropdown menu and find "Options", click on "Options", this gives me a rather large dropdown menu with a number of tabs. Select, and click on "Send" and when that tab comes up look toward the middle and locate "Include Messages in Reply". If that block has a check/X in it, click on it to remove the check/X............While there, look toward the top of the page and find "Mail" and "News", if a check/X is present for HTML then click on "Plain Text" in both "mail" and "News"........that will stop some of the time consumming "headers" from being produced along with your message............ What the above results in, is that if I send you a message listing 50 burials at a cemetery, you get the 50 burials list..however, when you send me a response of "Thanks", I don't get the list of 50 burials back with that message........also, if I have posted the list of burials to the maillist, and suppose 25 subscribers want to say "Thanks", then I get 25 messages each listing the 50 burials......and we wonder why the Internet is crowded with mail. Hope this helps.......... Hal from sunny Northern California!