Before L-SOFT allowed message deletion from the web interface, I found myself having to deal with subscribers who wanted their messages deleted. In all but a few cases, I always said no, explaining that it was time-consuming and exacting work. The exceptions I made usually involved revealing a famous person's email address or some similar betrayal of security. Because eliminating an entire message would upset the message count, I chose to remove the text but not the headers, substituting phases like "message deleted" in the headers. Something else to think about: once the messages go into the archive, the information is (in many cases) more valuable as a database than as a record of conversations among subscribers. In such cases, it can be more efficient to edit messages, reducing quoted material, or "me too" kinds of messages, allowing for more efficient indexing. (I used to do this systematically with a list and found that I could reduce the file size by at least a third.) Bob Kosovsky, Ph.D. -- Curator, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts blog: http://www.nypl.org/blog/author/44 Twitter: @kos2 Listowner: OPERA-L ; SMT-TALK ; SMT-ANNOUNCE ; SoundForge-users --- My opinions do not necessarily represent those of my institutions ---