Mentor, To get away from the heated debate about mail headers, I've had the same problem, but it came from formatting garbage left from a word processor. The guy that sent me the file swore up and down he had converted to lower order ASCII (and, his other two files were fine). It drove me up the wall, I *knew* I wasn't doing anything wrong. I got around it by sending a copy to my colistowner, who is at the host site and works on the same VM machine, with instructions on how to do an LSVPUT, which I can't do from down here. She followed my instructions and the file went in, no problem. I then "got" the file from the filelist and bingo! all the garbage showed up. I just edited it all out and put the file back in my usual way. If you want diacritics, like an umlauted e, I'm afraid you're just going to have to skip them and stick with lower order ASCII. That's what they do with Russian in books and newspapers. You're just supposed to know which is a "ye" and which is a "yo." Been doing it that way since they've had printing presses. Too much trouble to have the extra character when they can use just a plain "e" and leave it to the reader to know which it's supposed to be. Douglas Douglas Winship Hays County, Texas [log in to unmask] Secondary AUTOCAT Listowner MEDLAB-L