It should have been pretty easy to catch from the header in the message from the second poster (who was, as you mention, the one who stated that there was no law where he/she lived preventing fax-hunting):
Judging from the "MCI Canada" newsreader, the GMT -0300 time offset and the "hfx" in his (obfuscated) email address, I would hazard a more specific guess that he/she is located in or near Halifax, Nova Scotia. But the "Canada" part is pretty hard to miss regardless.
Lisa, this hardly becomes you. You are a well-known long-time and respected contributor to the Digest, so people will simply not find it credible if you claim you have never seen underscores used to indicate emphasis before. Any casual perusal of the back issues will show thousands of examples of such usage, which has its origins in the typewriter days when underlining was used for emphasis. Not all early computer display devices could handle underlining consistently, so a convention developed in which prefixing and suffixing a phrase with underscore characters indicated that the reader should treat the entire intervening phrase as if it were underlined.
Bob Goudreau Cary, NC