17 April 1995 Ottawa I have not found the big service providers to be a problem. Anytime my list has been spammed from one of them I have found firms like Delphi and aol pretty responsive to my complaint that the message is off topic and especially if it was sent to 197 lists and newsgroups. In general, I have also found postmistresses and postmasters at sites generally to be quite responsive to pleas for them to crank down the message level as I frankly do not care if my subscriber has read, replied to, forwarded or discarded the mail my list sent them or if the mail is delayed by one, two or four hours. Some have thanked me for telling them about things they were not aware of and one even responded to my question as to whether their softwre could send me hourly stats on their staff who were logged on and strongly desiring a conjugal relationship with a football team or the cheerleaders or both. Some systems have critical internal mail to handle and must set their error notification schedule morre frequent than I like but that is life. If I can help a postmaster make his software vendor repair or replace software not working to rfc spec, I will. e.g. sending delay or error notices to the reply-to: field and not to the sender: address. The problem I find is service providers who treat their gateways to Internet as a nusiance and are primarily intersted in their site or network's internal message traffic and do not repair broken gateways or take long vacations with no one else at the site able to repair anything until the postmaster gets back from Timbuktu. However, in general, I believe the overworked gatemasters, postmasters and their helpers are doing an excellent job to make the net a nice place for all.