I am sorry we were subjected to those emails. I was equally displeased to receive them. I deleted the offending forum queries that generated those emails as soon as I found out but there was nothing I could do about the emails that were already sent to visitors like yourself. Let me try to explain what happened. Anyone can post a query to our Scott Co, TN forum board. When queries or responses to queries are posted on the forum, everyone who is subscribed to the forum receives an email indicating a new query or response is available for viewing. What happened is that some jerk decided to create a dozen or so "inappropriate" queries or responses on the forum. The forum cannot tell if a query or response to a query is valid or appropriate---it just knows that somebody wrote something. The forum then dutifully notifies all the subscribers that a new query or response is available for viewing. As soon as I was aware of what happened, I had to search the entire forum (almost 2000 messages) to find this junk, and then delete them. Trust me, I was not happy. This also happened to other forum boards for other Tennessee counties. We got collectively spamed! Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to prevent it from happening because the forums are purposedly designed to allow anyone to be able create a posting. I can tell you this is the first time in nine years that the board has been spamed with that kind of junk. I occasionally see spam on the forum for cigarettes and various medicines, but again I delete that stuff as soon as I see it. Even that spam hasn't occurred in awhile. The forum is a valuable genealogy research tool. I encourage you to stay subscribed and not let these kinds of jerks "win" by causing you to modify your behavior in ways that denies the fun we all recieve from genealogy research. All I ask is when stuff like this happens in the future, please resist the temptation to respond to the offending query even if you think you are helping by notifying me. This only causes more of the offending junk to fill up our email inboxes. I receive email notifications for each and every post to the query forum so I know when stuff like this happens. I will delete this junk as soon as I read my email--generally within a day. (Remember I too go on vacation or business trips so there may be times when the junk may stay of the forum longer than it should but rest assured I will delete it when I return.) ...tim west... Scott Co, TN Coordinator for the TNGenWeb