I think I have just witnessed the death throes of list perishing from it's own success. ETHICS-L has been generating so much mail in the last few days that a number of active participants have felt compelled to sign off for fear of endangering their jobs. One solution to this kind of high level activity is the ability to look in on a list is the from time to time (interval user specifiable of course). The current LISTSERV structure doesn't appear to support this kind of interface very well though. The SPIRES-L list is currently being archived in a SPIRES data base rather than (in addition to?) the usual CMS notebooks. Several people have already used this fact to set up their one jobs to search the archive and retrieve messages on a daily or even weekly basis. In most cases they are also using a local facility for automated job submission to initiate the remote search. While it may be possible to do the same sort of thing with Eric's data base facility in LISTSERV, the mechanics are not obvious to me. The question also arises as to whether the database feature is generally available on all LISTSERVs and whether they all are tresting their archives as searchable databases. To the extent that any of this is possible I's sure like to see someone whip an end user document with a title something like: Tracking a LISTSERV list in non-real time. The document should show how to restrict a search based on date (and possibly time) as sell as significant keywords. Any takers? /June To: LSTSRV-L(LSTSRV-L@POLYGRAF)