Much as I dislike "pre-announcing" things and spoiling the good work our marketing folks are putting in press releases and other formal announcements, I'd rather do that than leave problems unsolved. With all the GIT lists now "in the street" and some PSU lists soon to be looking for a new home as well, I'd like to mention two new options for hosting the lists that may look attractive to some of you. These are commercial options however, so if you have positively no money the best is to post a description of the list to LSTSRV-L. There have been many such postings in the past couple days and I think it would be best if the list owners would try to spread them over several days because when I saw all these LSTSRV-L messages I thought "Oh no, not another spam!" and I might have deleted everything unread if LISTSERV were only a peripheral duty :-) Anyway the first option is to pay someone to host your list on a machine with LISTSERV. ClarkNet has had such a service for a couple months now (write to [log in to unmask] for more info), and L-Soft is about to open a list hosting and management service as well. Technically we are ready to start hosting lists, we just have a couple of loose ends to tighten on the marketing side. The price list for business and academic lists is ready, but we're still trying to figure out how to price "personal" lists (lists paid by an individual and not used for any commercial or profit-making purpose). It seems other list providers have various prices depending on whether or not you're buying other services from them and which salesman you happen to talk to. Another issue is billing. We're not currently able to accept credit cards, and registering for that is proving to be about as easy as swimming across the Atlantic. In general, incredible though it may seem, in the US it is extremely difficult to do business unless you've already been doing business for many years. So we're used to having to fly overseas and back just to buy the paper, so to speak, and I don't doubt that we'll succeed eventually, but in a world where insurance companies cancel your flood and fire insurance because they find out you have employees in other states, there's no telling what complications may arise and how long it will take to solve that problem. Naturally it is quite expensive to mail monthly invoices and then collect and deposit the checks. Currently we're billing on a quarterly basis to minimize the impact of administrative costs. Anyway the current prices are between $30-50/month for the kinds of lists that have been mentioned recently. The lowest price I've ever seen from small club-like or non-profit outfits was $10/month. I imagine that when our survey of our competitors' pricing is over there will be a new category somewhat in between for smaller personal lists, but I can't promise anything. For more information, write to [log in to unmask] Another option for the more academic lists would be to run the lists on the Windows NT version of LISTSERV, which is finished and working, even though it hasn't been formally released yet. The advantage of Windows NT is that in a typical office setup you're likely to find a number of "workgroup servers" which may run either NT, OS/2 or Windows for Workgroups. If they run WfW, there will usually be plans to upgrade to NT. Unless the server is low on memory, you can install LISTSERV on it without having to buy any additional hardware. In most universities there are central mail servers where thousands of PC mail users send their mail using POP3 or whatever. You can have the LISTSERV PC send the mail to these central servers, and you won't have to worry about learning unix or fixing /etc/sendmail.cf. While you *should* ask the managers of the central mail servers for permission, it seems that they usually have no objection as long as you're talking about small lists. These are machines that typically handle 10-100k mail deliveries daily. They don't do anything else and have no angry users complaining about slow compilations. Finally, it's not very difficult to justify upgrades to management. They're not all that expensive to start with, and management usually thinks more e-mail and less paper mail is good. So if you have a workgroup server and a campus mail server, you can get an entry-level Windows NT license for $500/year (academic) including maintenance, support and new versions. This will let you run one huge list, 5 small ones, or anything in between ("small" = 150 subscribers or less). In fact you may be able to share the license with other administrative lists to split the costs, and once the PC people realize what LISTSERV can do for them, they should have no problem justifying a license upgrade. Eric