Well, since we're all making forecasts, here is what I think will happen to the current free/academic/educational lists in the next couple years. There will always be a core of 100% serious, purely academic lists supported by the universities, by grants, whatever. Just as today. But the universities won't be able to keep meeting the demand for the more recreational, "half serious" lists. Some will be sponsored by commercial interests (in fact this is already starting to happen), some will disappear, some may turn into pay-to-read electronic magazines, but I think the bulk of these lists will survive through private donations of time and money by the list owners. Today, most list owners have a PC at home and dial-up access with some sort of scheme where they pay by the hour. The hardware to run a list is still on the high end on what list owners are likely to have at home. But look at the 386es. They were brand new just a few years ago, and now they're considered obsolete. That's the kind of machine list owners have at home. In a couple years, they'll probably have sluggish 486es that nobody wants to get near, or obsolete Pentiums for the less unfortunate. These machines are more than sufficient to run a mailing list. I'm also willing to bet that 64k ISDN access will be available at affordable rates. And, as you know, LISTSERV was been ported to Win95, which by then should have the same degree of market penetration as Windows 3.1 today. So, my guess is that say 25-50% of list owners will have the necessary equipment to run lists at home, at an affordable surcharge (leaving the PC on 24h and buying the software and/or an ISDN card). 4-5 owners could pool their funds and buy the necessary additional hardware/software to run the lists, and off we go... I am not worried about the free lists :-) Naturally there's a limit to how far this can go, because a home PC may not have the reliability to run a large list, and the list owner may not be technical enough to sort out the system tuning problems associated with large volumes. There will be commercial outfits offering quality pay-to-read magazines and I don't see why they wouldn't be successful. But I think that with the democratization of mailing lists, there won't be any homeless list in the future. The main obstacle right now is dependable, 24h Internet access at affordable rates. But when I see what the leading providers are doing, I have no doubt that it will all become widely available within a year or two. That's my 2 cents :-) Eric