One suggestion for importing old archives: let LISTSERV do the work for you! In other words, create a dummy list with a huge daily-threshold and all the acknowledgement stuff turned off. Then write a script to burst your foreign archives into individual emails and send each one on to your dummy list. LISTSERV happily processes them and creats a new notebook formatted to its liking. The original dates on the posts are not altered. If the dummy list has a different name then you can globally change it after the new archives are created. I have done this successfully with literaly thousands of posts from old non-LISTSERV archives. The exact method of getting your burst posts to LISTSERV without adding any new To:/From: etc. headers is probably the tricky part. I did this on VM where it is trivial but I can't imagine it's much more difficult with any other system. And compatibility of the new archives is guaranteed :-) -- Bill Gruber City University of New York