Dear subscribers, I was not able to disable Tom any sooner than now. Please be patient while such slips happen, we'll try to deal with asap. Any request to the mailing list to disable such a an auto-reply mechanism will lead to even _more_ out of office mails! Which leads me to the unavoidable reminder: should _you_ ever be out of the office or even indulge in the luxury of vacation - please do not send out of office auto-replies to this mailing list (nor any other mailing list). In case you and your mailing system cannot agree on how to guarantee this, please temporarily disable your subscription (by selecting the "no mail" option). One general strategy I personally use a lot is to have a second personal email address that I only use for mailing list subscriptions. Olaf Druemmer