Listen, In spite of the generic title, we all know that this discussion is about certain large service providers that certain list owners would like to nuke over the board. I don't want to restrict the freedom of speech on this list, but I think that in this case the best recipe is patience. The large service providers are getting into mailing lists, very cautiously because of all the horror stories they've heard of, but they're getting there. When they do, the small service providers will all follow overnight. Now, think about the implications. It stands to reason that if provider X introduces mailing lists to Joe Ignorant User, and Joe decides this list stuff sounds cool and takes up the provider on its offer, most of the people on Joe's list will, at least initially, be users with an account at the same provider. Now as you know many of them don't know not to subscribe to lists and leave for 3 weeks, so Joe's mailbox will start to fill up. Guess what Joe will do then. Multiply by 1000 Joes, and calculate the odds that the provider's mail system will continue to generate unusable delivery errors, or complain about not having delivered for 2h and continuing for 5 days. The problem will solve itself when the providers start offering lists themselves and a senior manager realizes that spending a couple thousand dollars to make programmer X fix program Y will save tens of thousands in support fees. Eric