Lauren wrote: "The -L is not part of the list name. It was an artificial designator to force Smartlist to do something that even it was not designed to do. To my knowledge "ListServ" was not the software ever used at Rootsweb.com" Lauren is correct that RootsWeb never used the ListServ software. RootsWeb went public in early April 1996 and announced SmartList within a week. However, a number of existing genealogy-related lists were eventually migrated from other servers to RootsWeb by August 1997, and many of those had been ListServ-based and were already using -L names. I suspect that there was a desire at that time not to change those names and to be consistent with the naming of new lists. And because SmartList did not support "Mail" and "Digest" options (as most other list management software does), it was necessary to actually create two different names for the two formats, a workaround that involved using -L and -D names. Now that the new list management software (Mailman) actually *does* support subscription options with a *single* list name, the -L part isn't really needed. Drew Smith