To original poster (Adrian Costescu). I'm a long time member of this list. It is probably the finest list on Linux in general. A lot of excellent people is gathered around it, and they are sharing very valuable information among the members. But, as you can see, it has its price to be on the list too. Following its content, you'll witness unbeleivable things: starting from rather often and benign (but sometimes even fun and entertaining) OT threads, it occasionally turns into either patological nitpicking perfectionism or even worse into ignorant, arrogant, humiliating and insulting pitch aimed at random targets. (Among many examples, just remember the "TOFU pro et contra" cannibalism that burns out every now and then). As you experienced, there are so many people ready to jump on the "privacy", "legality", "ethics" and such concepts, while being totally insensitive to the small but important detail on how your origin was misused in the first place. They just don't get the implicit insult that they made there, that's it. There's no help there, unfortunatelly. With time, you'll sort these rare exemplars out and learn how to work around their shallowness. Also, take care about the fun part, some of them are very valuable contributors to the list, but only when "out of the court" and not "judging", of course. I definitely think the SLE list membership is worth this price. <irony> Anyway, if you want to enjoy the list membership to the max, you should create a throw-away mail account with a fake identity. Just take care to find one that can hold the mail's rather high traffic. Take care to make up an American-sounding name. With that being done, join the list again. You'll see, the signal-to-noise ratio will increase significantly. At least, nobody will ever single you out based on your (real) birthplace...:-) Collateral benefit might be that you'll be able to flame other people's asses with certain immunity, and expect considerable back-up, too. </irony> Seriously, I guess many people on this list use this trick. What do you think - why so many "Americans" on the list have so bad spelling and grammar? It is not because they are illiterate and uneducated, for sure... :-) And, yes, you'll notice that certain nations are simply not there, despite the true international nature of the list. You don't think it's because they don't use SuSE Linux, do you? Now, I am afraid I'll have to switch my identity too if I don't stop right now. :-) I guess another wave of flames follows right now, get prepared...I feel them tracing my IP address already. Hopefully not. Regards, cikasole