Tom: Thank you for posting your suggestion. To help clarify how the PRA's mailing list hosted here on Rootsweb.com works, let me review the two primary purposes the PRA established the list. 1. To help with the exchange of genealogy information with other researchers who are working on the Pennington (Penington, Penitone) families. 2. To help foster discussions about the activities of the Pennington Research Association and to help keep our members informed of the activities of the Pennington Research Association. The recent discussions on our mail list have been most interesting and it is my opinion they are well within the guidelines for this list. In fact, the mail list has been more active in the past few weeks than it was a couple of months ago. Active participation by our subscribers is the key to the success of any mail list and the more our members share their research, suggestions and information with each other, the more valuable the list becomes. I do have one suggestion for you if you wish to reduce the number of messages you receive each day from our list. You may want to subscribe to our mail list in the "digest mode". To learn how to subscribe in the "digest mode", go to --> http://www.penningtonresearch.org/resources/mail_list.htm . To further clarify how the list works, you should know the list is configured to send a reply message back to the mail list when you use the "reply" or "reply to" button on your e-mail software program. If a person wants to send a "private" message to the author of a message posted on the mail list, they should copy that person's e-mail address and send a separate message directly to them - NOT to the mail list. This configuration gives both the readers of our messages and the authors the ability to send to either/or the mail list and to the author of the message. In the past when we've surveyed our members, the overwhelming majority liked the mail list configured this way because it was the "best of both worlds" because our members could read the discussions posted by everybody, or if they didn't want to read them, they could either ignore the message or delete it. I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any more questions or suggestions. Gene Pennington (Group 7) Vice President Research Director Pennington Research Association, Inc. www.PenningtonResearch.org