I think if you took a step back from the issue you would realize that this not only was bound to happen, but is a perfectly normal and justified development. More and more people are getting connected to the Internet and want to use e-mail as a vehicle for information they used to get by FAX, snail mail, etc. I suppose we would all agree that this is a good thing. Well then, what are information providers supposed to do? They need to charge for the information in order to be able to produce it. If they can't charge for it when it's delivered on the Internet, they can't deliver it that way and they'll have to keep wasting paper just so that they can collect the money they need to prepare or compile the information. The Internet is unique in that, unlike other media, it started as a 100% free (to the end user) service. This was possible to a large extent because of government subsidies. This model clearly doesn't scale up and people have been doing business over the Internet for several years already. I mean when a customer writes to me to report a problem and I answer, we've saved an expensive phone call and none of us has really contributed anything to the people who help configure and manage the mail systems we've used (all right, in this particular case the correspondants usually *are* the people who manage the mail systems in question, but you get the point :-) ). What happens when we do that is that we decrease costs, and this translates to reduced software bills for everyone's benefit. Everyone wins except AT&T :-) Eric