Most LISTSERV commands respond by appending lines of text to whatever output channel is being used for the command reply: web interface, e-mail message, etc. LISTSERV then moves on to the next command (if any) and appends more text to the output channel. This is how QUERY works. Some commands will also e-mail you a file, usually in addition to some sort of normal command response (if only to let you know that something has been mailed). Primarily, the GET command does that - this is what GET is all about. Then there are all the variants of GET, such as INDEX, which is just a synonym for GET with certain parameters, or REVIEW. The LISTS command and a few others will also send an attachment when certain options are used. But other than GET and its derivatives, there are only a handful of commands that send you a file, and only with unusual parameters. Any command that responds by sending you a file is not going to show you anything on the web interface, and this is almost never what you want. When a file is being sent to you, you can use command keywords like SPLIT=xxx or F=MIME/APPL. These keywords apply only to the command on which they appear. The output channel on the other hand is global. It is opened before the first command is executed and closed when the last command has completed. It is usually not buffered, ie LISTSERV passes on any response text as the command generates it. To turn the output channel into a file, LISTSERV would have to know in advance that this is what you want - before the first command is executed. This file could then be sent to you when the last command completes. QUERY ***GUI*** is an internal command for the web interface. You are of course welcome to use it for other purposes, but it was designed for the web interface, which does not want to receive any e-mail responses. In fact, it would be a disaster since the web interface cannot access your mailbox :-) Eric