At 05:38 PM 2/3/99 +0000, you wrote: >Does it really cause any problems if two lists at different hosts have the >same name? What are the implications? Has it given any of you trouble? > >Ian Hall Some people who are on lists at several sites are in the habit of always writing to [log in to unmask] rather than remembering where their lists are. Since more and more of our lists are confidential, this doesn't work very well for most of our lists anyway, although if there is a non-confidential list with the same name elsewhere it is even worse, because the request ends up going to that other site. Then the other site may sign them up to a list there, or if they are trying to get off the list it will say they aren't on it and refer them to some list owner -there- for more information. We have a confidential list that has the same name as a list elsewhere, except that we spell it differently (by one letter). We wouldn't have seen this other list when we checked for conflicts because of the different spelling, but it may actually be worse than having the same name. Because whenever someone tried to sign off our list and spelled the name the -other- way, the request would go to the wrong place -even if they wrote to our server-. We finally made a list here with the other spelling and newlisted it to ours in an attempt to stop this. (Interestingly, in our particular case the other list is also confidential and the other list owner claims it has been all along. But the site may be the backbone site our server forwards requests to. Could this be the explanation?) Margaret King ([log in to unmask]) Michigan State University