Hi y'all, I want to apologize to all of you for the inconvenience with the mass message mailings that we've been subjected to in the last couple of days. I've had over 1,000 postings that had to be deleted. Maybe folks need to be educated that when you reply to a message complaining about it, you are just perpetuating the entire chain. Because of this, I've closed all my mailing lists, which means that in order to post to the lists a person must join. I've also put the people who sent the messages and those who have kept the chain going on my reject list which means that they cannot join. This should solve the problem. This should be a lesson to all of us; when we want to send copies to others, limit our copies to 2 or 3 at one time. I'd had to loose the Rootsweb server because some inconsiderate people are just to lazy to do multiple mailings instead of copying to everyone at one time. Below is a copy of a letter from Rootsweb regarding this problem: Hi all - Here's an explanation of what's going on: Each of Rootsweb's mail servers is designed to receive about 1,500 incoming pieces of mail each day and deliver them to the list subscribers. Cross-posting an article to too many lists (say more than 5 lists) can seriously interfere with the operation of one of those servers. Why? Consider what happened this morning, when someone cross-posted an article to 50 lists. This particular thread, because it has been cross-posted to 50 lists and spawned about 20 replies that were also cross-posted, has by itself generated about 1,000 inbound messages. That's almost doubled the load on the server. That's bad. What's worse, the servers are designed to receive an inbound piece of mail on average about once each minute. When something is massively cross-posted to 50 lists, though, the server has to absorb essentially a whole hour's worth of work arriving within a few milliseconds. That *really* jars the machinery. And here's what's *really* bad: A few poor souls were subscribed to all or most of those 50 lists. Within the span of a few hours, they received 50 copies each of 20 messages. That means they were mailbombed by a 1000 pieces of e-mail, and that caused them all sorts of pain. So that's why RootsWeb discourages massive cross-posting. However, we haven't announced a formal policy because folks don't make this mistake too often, and anyway we're working on a technical solution that would simply make it impossible for users to accidentally do this. Cheers, B. -- Dr. Brian Leverich Co-moderator, soc.genealogy.methods/GENMTD-L RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative http://www.rootsweb.com/ P.O. Box 6798, Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798 leverich@rootsweb.com Patti Caldwell - Listmistress <underline><color><param>0000,0000,ffff</param>mailto:impattic@mediaone.net </color></underline><fontfamily><param>Times New Roman</param>Remember, "please practice random acts of kindness......" Member: Western Pennsylvania Genealogical Society <color><param>0000,0000,ffff</param><<http://www.clpgh.org/CLP/Pennsylvania/oak_pennag.html> </color></fontfamily>Member and supporter of RootsWeb <color><param>0000,0000,ffff</param><<http://www.rootsweb.com/> </color><bold> </bold>