The answer is deceptively simple: there are thousands of messages in LISTSERV. Not only would it take weeks of work to turn them all into templates, it would make the whole template system unusable. Imagine looking for, say, the welcome message among thousands of tiny two-line templates denoting problem conditions whose existence you did not even suspect. Imagine downloading another 100k of HTML data every time you access the list management interface because that is the size of the pull-down data for these templates. Imagine complaints about browser crashes because there were more entries that the browser could handle.

Templates are simply not the correct method for customizing large numbers of small, seldom-modified messages. This is why only the most frequently modified messages are available as templates.

L-Soft recognizes that EVERY message visible to list owners and users should be modifiable. This will eventually become possible and will require the development of a new facility, separate from the template system. The primary drive for this process is translation, which has the potential to increase revenues significantly in some markets. Translation, however, is a very expensive (and slow) undertaking  that will take years to pay off - not the kind of investment we want to make in today's economy.

  Eric