All, We seem to be getting lots of new people on the list recently, which is generally a good thing. However, some participants seem to be a little inexperienced in how to write a reply. Remember, this is not ICQ and Instant Messaging. You have some control over where and how your text appears. Use it wisely. In the interests of peace, good order, and getting lots of helpful responses, would everybody please: - edit your replies -- that means trim off everything from the old message except the paragraph or two to which you are replying. Never reproduce somebody's signature and tag-lines, unless that is specifically what you are replying to. If somebody included a lengthy excerpt from a log file or a shell script, or program output, then everybody in the list received it at least once. They don't need you to quote it to them again - trim it out of your reply. - write your replies below the material to which you are replying -- that means, either start writing at the bottom, or else write your replies between paragraphs of the other person's message, and there should be no quoted text after your last sentence. Writing your replies above quoted material is called "top-posting" and it seems to offend some of the old-timers (the people with the most experience and knowledge, whom you would therefore least like to offend...), and it makes it difficult to follow an ongoing conversation. As well, if you leave a lot of untrimmed quoted text in a message, it annoys people who scroll all the way down, only to find out that you made them waste their time. People who are receiving a digest version have to scroll past all your useless quoting just to get to the next message in the digest. You want to be more polite and accommodating than that, don't you? Good. We appreciate it. If you are using KMail, then when you see a sentence or a paragraph that really needs a response from you, highlight just that piece of text and press the "L" key. This creates a new message in the thread, containing only the text that you highlighted, and addressed to the mailing list (not to the original sender, who doesn't really need or want to see two copies of your reply in his in-box). In other words, text-select plus "L" key does most of the things that list-etiquette requests. The only thing that it doesn't seem to do automatically is to place your cursor at a starting position below the last line of quoted text. I guess the makers of KMail wanted to leave something for you to do. If you are using another mail program that doesn't support these KMail functions........ fake it. There. It's not Christmas or Hannukah yet, and I'm not sure about the other observances, but it is the solstice today.... so enjoy a lovely solstice and trim, trim, trim. Cheers, Kevin