Peter, Thankyou for your explanations and your patience. I understand the terminations now, and how my dist file can be corrupt without my being able to see it. Charlie, I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to help. But why you feel the need to spend five paragraphs chastising me for doing things wrong when I obviously _don't_know what I'm doing or I wouldn't be asking for help in the first place is beyond me. My intention was not to cause you or anyone else frustration. I wasn't being NOT serious... I was simply trying to learn something new and having a pleasant demeanor while doing it (when that became a crime, I don't know?). I was joking because I'm frustrated and I was being humorously apolgetic because I really didn't want to *bother* anyone, but I don't know where else to turn. Sine humor doesn't seem to go over well around here, let's get down to business. YES, I know I'm doing things wrong. NO, I don't particularly want to deal with this but I've gotten quotes for $350 - $1750 for hosting my mailing list. I send A LOT of mail.... 326,000 pieces at 17k each in a month, to be exact. I don't know how much money you make but in my book that isn't cheap. SmartList is set up on a virtual shared server. I don't have SSH access because I don't even know what that is. I could, I suppose, but I don't even know hw to go about it. What would it look like were I in it? A text editor? Something completely foreign to me? I don't even know... I am editing the files with Wordpad afterI have FTPed them (yes, I know that's WRONG now!) to my Windows 98 SE machine. I can access the smartlist through a really crappy web interface that my hosting company provides, but nothing (meaning the unsubbing) worked properly when I did so I stopped using it and started trying to do it manually, through FTP and WordPad. Obviously that was not the thing to do and now I know that (can we please not reiterate that for the thirtieth time since I already feel like an idiot?). So is this something that I can do relatively easily, once I get telnet access? My server says something about sending in my drivers license photo and then being able to use my "key"? If this is all too much, I found a cgi mailing list program called "MailSupply" that seems to be much more user-friendly to someone like me who doesn't have any formal training in list management. Perhaps I should go that route. Smartlist only claims to be able to handle, what... 90,000 subscribers? Our list is growing so fast we'll be past that in no time. Again, being new to this I really don't know, but I'm sure I'll learn it one way or another. Thanks again to both of you, Autumn