>I imagine that any listowner who has repeatedly cajoled, pleaded, begged >that subscribers stop the totally useless wholesale quoting has at times >wished for that. I certainly have, though I've never asked for it. >Of course, the subscribers will NOT like it. I'm not sure you realize that changing the quoting character is a simple point and click operation with all the GUI mail programs I have used (but admittedly I've hardly tried them all). It defaults to '>' but you can easily use something else. You can't rely on the fact that most users will not know that this is possible, because one will and spreading knowledge is what mailing lists are all about :-) Lazy users will by definition do what takes them the least amount of time, which is to change the quoting character, and it is no longer an obscure .blah_rc operation with a cryptic syntax that only a techie stands a chance of understanding. Usenet has shown that this will not work unless you start kicking users off for changing their quoting character. Personally I would never delete a user for this reason, I mean, who am I to tell people what character to use to quote their message??? I would be mad if I got the boot from a list because the list owner decided that the official quoting character is the colon and my mail program doesn't do it this way! I would make sure that this policy were shown in, ah, the proper light, and the list owner would be sorry :-) No, I would just kick users off for overquoting, regardless of the character they used, which is why I have never wished for this feature. I know that down the line I am going to have to give the worst offenders the boot so that the rest of the group realizes that maybe I am serious when I say I don't want excessive quotes, and that the only difference is whether we play a little cat and mouse game before or we just do it right away. I also don't police quote length unless it gets really outrageous, because I know that many people will NOT resubmit when the quote police punted them, but that is a more personal decision, based in part on the fact that I only host lists at sites that have plenty of disk space because it is so cheap nowadays. If I ran lists on a host with limited disk space, I would police the quotes for sure. There are other methods by the way, for instance in a previous job I used to refuse to answer messages with excessive quoting, and people quickly figured out the equation. They could spend 5 sec removing the 2000 lines of quotes, or they could save 5 sec but actually end up having wasted 5 min typing a message I would not answer, and then finding out the answer from the manuals. In a few weeks I had "convinced" hundreds of people of the necessity to avoid excessive quoting :-) This was better than making a fuss because "You don't understand, my mail program this and that, anyway I have the right to write the way I want!" and you can spend ages having a discussion that just goes nowhere. Eric