The nonsense you get is indeed HTML. Some people on the list send HTML mail. The "digest" software strings all the messages together, which makes the HTML impossible for your e-mail program to decipher, so what you get is all text and mostly gibberish. The repeated messages are people quoting the entire message they're replying to. Be grateful nobody here uses parchments or sound in their e-mail, then the digest would contain thousands of lines of random letters and numbers... One thing you can try to do is change your subscription status again, and set it to MIME digests. In MIME format, the digest is not one long message containing the text of all the day's posts. Rather, it is a message with several attachments, each of which is one post. If you e-mail client can handle attachments, this may be more convenient for you. In this format, you don't have to try to figure out where one post starts and the other ends, and you don't have to look at raw HTML. I think you can also set your subscription to "no mail", and just read the messages on the web. Good luck, Orit