Hello subscribers, I am sending this message to all lists that I administer, so I apologize ahead of time for those of you who will unavoidably receive duplicates. I have made two temporary changes in all the lists that I manage, in an effort to avoid some heavy spamming that has been aimed systematically at various Rootsweb lists and boards. None of the lists or boards that I manage have been hit yet with this particular spam, and hopefully with these temporary changes none will be hit in the future either. The temporary changes are as follows: 1) I have temporarily removed the auto subscription ability. This means that anybody who wishes to change how they are subscribed to any of these lists will need to be patient with me since I will need to do whatever changes are needed manually rather than allowing Smartlist to process them automatically. I believe you can still unsubscribe by yourself, but you will need my assistance for any subscribe requests. 2) Due to a quirk in how the list tools work, change number 1 resulted in the gateway address being placed on the reject list for all lists that I manage. For at least one list, it was there already, but for the others, this is a change. This means that any messages posted to the message board will, temporarily, no longer automatically be forwarded to the paired mailing list. While I wasn't planning to do this initially, it's just as well due to this particular spamming campaign which has hit numerous message boards so far. The gatewayed messages from the message boards will still come to me, but they will not be sent to the lists automatically. I will forward those which are appropriate on to the respective list in question, with the following caveat: If this temporary change results in an increase in the number of message board messages whose replies never reach the intended recipient, I may have to cease forwarding the message board posts. Hopefully before too long Rootsweb management and staff will soon be able to deal with the spamming menace upfront so that the lists and boards won't have to. When that happens, things will return to normal. Any questions about these temporary changes should come directly to me rather than the list. Thank you in advance for your cooperation while these temporary changes are in effect. -- Your list admin, Mary Taffet mdtaffet@syr.edu