You can't get message ID's in logs. The most common way of quoting messages posted to a list is to list the name and address of the sender, along with the date. Barring software failures, this is a unique combination and it is more convenient than an arbitrary message ID string: to locate the message in your folder, you will normally only need to search for a part of the date, or of the sender's name, and there won't be more than a handful of matches. The date and poster's name are everyday items which are easy to memorize for long enough to scan the log and find the message. Unfortunately, there are people who think it is "chic" to quote other postings this way: Quoted from message with ID <[log in to unmask]>: > blah blah blah There is no simple way to shorten the message ID string for a search. Message ID's being usually based on large arbitrary numbers, you stand a good chance of mistyping it anyway. Even if you were to search for, say, just 6828, you would probably have forgotten the original string when you do find something with 6828 in the log. Not to mention the subscribers who get short headers and thus no message ID at all. So what is wrong about using sender+date? Eric