thanks.  that's helpful to know.  A few things I can say definitively (rather than my former vagueness): 1)  I still can't select the individual mail option for the google group.  yet, I am getting individual mail as if it is working correctly.  I ALSO get the digest (which I don't actually want and end up deleting).  I've never had any problems before. 2)  In other groups, the mail just comes from the message group email address.  Here the message comes from the sender, and the cc is the message group email address.  Because I was forgetting to do "reply all", I wasn't picking up the message group, and wound up only sending back to the previous sender. perhaps both issues have to do with the Brown server, I dunno. <div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 11:36 PM, Eli Barzilay <<a href="mailto:eli@barzilay.org">eli@barzilay.org</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="Ih2E3d">On Feb 14, e wrote: > I don't think I sent this to the group last time.  Something odd > still about how I interact with this group vs. the other ones I'm </div>> in: [...] If you're referring to the delay between sending an email and seeing it on the list -- this is a result of the Brown mail server (where the mailing list is hosted) doing "greylisting".  This basically means that sometimes emails get delayed for a while. [Greylisting is a method that is used against spam: if the server doesn't "know you", it will reject your email in a way that makes proper mail servers retry sending the message.  The idea is that spammers use servers in a way that makes it impractical for their servers to resend email, so the email will be dropped.  Once the graylisting server sees a few emails from you, it remembers you and will stop doing that delay.] --          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:                  <a href="http://www.barzilay.org/" target="_blank">http://www.barzilay.org/</a>                 Maze is Life! </blockquote></div>