Attempting to not repeat previous errors of judgement, I decided to research the claim that money would be given to a food bank for every piece of mail sent to various addresses, and found the following message at the world-wide web address http://north.pole.org/ : ------------------------ Please Don't Spam Santa There is a rumor going around that we're trying to get as many messages as possible sent to [log in to unmask] Not true ... Santa has all the mail he can handle and asks that you refrain from spamming him or there might be a few last-minute transfers to the "naughty" list. ------------------------ I think the possible source of this confusion is the following message, which I located at http://www.sun.com/events/santa/index.html: ------------------------ Each time you visit the North Pole Sun makes a donation to the Second Harvest Food Bank, an organization that's been feeding the Bay Area's homeless since 1974. ------------------------ Note that this says that Sun donates money to the food bank every time you visit the north pole WWW page, _not_ every time you send mail to one of the addresses linked to the WWW page. This is not completely obvious from the way this is worded, but I think it's the correct interpretation. -jwgh --------------------- They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things. (Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites)