Most of what follows I learned recently by experimentation and by studying the LSTSRV-L archives from when the stuff was announced. You can have in the list header Topics= and Default-Topics= keywords. Up to twelve topics can be defined; there are also two reserved "topics". A sender indicates one or more topics by putting them at the start of the subject followed by a colon. For example, in the following subject line, the topics are "young" and "montana" Subject: young, montana: That was then, this is now Notes that don't indicate a topic will be treated as if their topic is "Other" (this is one of the keywords). The other keyword is "All." When used as a note's topic, it means, "Send this to everyone who's signed up for one or more topics." A list owner can assign through Default-Topics a set of topics people will get by default; users can add or drop topics through set listname topics= +topic1 -topic2 topic3 where "topic1" would be added to the topic list and "topic2" and "topic3" would be dropped for that user. Thus, if a user has asked only for topics "deberg" and "brodie" they won't get the above note. A user can add or drop "other" just like any normal topic. "All" on the other hand means each topic on the list; +all means a user gets all mail, -all means they get no mail until they add one or more topics to the list. set listname topics= brodie montana would be equivilent to: topics = -all +brodie montana List owners can change the topics, but because topics are stored by relative values, not the real value of the word, on a user-by-user basis, this can have weird side effects if you, for instance, change "brodie" to "walsh"; suddenly the Brodie fans find their mail treated as "Other" and get mail meant for "Walsh" fans. Hope this helps, Nick -- * [log in to unmask] * ------ * Come to the 1994 VM Workshop: June 7-11 at the University of Notre * Dame! User Experience talks, dialogues with IBM, and presentations * from other vendors in an informal setting. Contact me or sign up for * [log in to unmask] for details!