Thank you for explaining further, Linda. It seems that SmartList determines the age of a waiting digest queue by the arrival time of the oldest message in it rather than by the issue time of the previous digest. I can see arguments for both methods and have to conclude that for some lists it's the age of the oldest undigestified article that should count, while for others it's the age of the previous digest issue. The decision of which matters more -- how long an article has been sitting or, now that at least one new article is queued for a digest issue, how long digest-mode readers have been waiting -- *has* to differ from list to list. Ideally the criterion should be selectable for each list by its listowner; is a new Boolean in rc.custom called for?