Hi Steve,

Thanks for the feedback and I hope others may have a solution -- I
never dreamed that someone would keep the messages on their own hard
drive.

I can explain the choice I had and the one I selected. Before my
university went to Google Apps (gmail), I used a sophisticated, hidden
feature of Eudora (and the number of IT people who didn't know this
was possible supports my word choice) to edit submitted messages and
repost them to the list under the sender's name. My editing consists
of cleaning up typos, removing sometimes very long trails, and so
forth. With gmail, I can edit, but I cannot make the message appear
under the original sender's name. I tested repeatedly and had techies
at my university, York, and Syracuse helping and every trick failed.

Under pressure to keep posting messages, I was forced to choose between:

A) Messages come from the sender, but I can no longer edit them. This
is what most lists do.

B) Messages come from me and I can edit them.

I chose B. I understood the cost in terms of the loss of the original
sender's name, but it seemed to me that the ability to search messages
enabled the archive to function. As I said above, I did not consider
the cost to someone who keeps messages on their HD. Sorry about that.

I'm not sure, however, that incorporating this cost changes my
decision. The ability to edit is critical. For many of our
subscribers, writing in English is difficult and I have been thanked
for light editing many times. I think the conversations on this list,
decades from now, will be a valuable resource and having relatively
clean messages (especially without trails) is important. I agree that
the old archive was ideal because it had edited messages AND the
original sender's name, but when forced to choose, I went with the
former. I suppose you could argue that it's a false choice and there
is some tech solution, but I just couldn't find it.

Perhaps, Steve, you could use the subject line and time stamp to
organize the messages? Maybe others have workarounds?

To all, if there are other problems with this new system or you value
having the original sender's name over editing, please let me know.
I'm just the moderator and I will do want the list wants -- if I can!

Humberto Barreto
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