Received this response to my query. pat cw A response to your Help Desk message, "MISC: Email Addresses are Illegible ," of Sun, 30 Oct 2005, at 11:50 a.m. follows: ------------------------- Address (URL) of web site, if applicable: All of them on family tree and rootsweb.com entries, as well as on ancestry. too. Message: I and others have written to the MILLS LIST to say that the email addresses are very hard to decipher on both roots web and ancestry both on the family tree and the message boards when we click on the submitter's name. It is so clogged with background dust, or whatever you want to call it. I cannot tell if the email address letters are "e" or "c" or if an "i" is an "l" or a "j" or whatever. Can you please clear this up for future use. It is very annoying to write an email to the parties selected and it comes back as unknown user, etc., not our customer or whatever else the returned mail messages can be. See MILLS LIST of today, 10 30 05 for others comments as well. Patricia: Unfortunately, it is a deliberate decision to display the e-mail addresses against a low-contrast background to foil the spammers who would scrape addresses from our web pages. If you subscribe to the list and receive the messages in your e-mail program, you'll get the plain text version. Reading the messages from the message boards or the archiver web pages will show you the addresses against the grey pebbly background. Regards, Elsi ------------------------- To respond to this message, please press your 'Reply' button. To post a question on a different topic, revisit the form located at http://helpdesk.rootsweb.com/help.cgi Thank You!!