First up nobody was banned for asking a question :-) we have IP bans purely to prevent hackers etc, for example we had about 50 people! trying to buy subscriptions about a year ago all using IP addresses from the same country (I won't mention which one because don't want to upset anybody from that country) but the addresses they put down were from all over the world, so we banned a range of IP addresses to prevent them doing it again, unfortunately innocent people got caught up in that range.  As for e-mail addresses we have very tight spam filters, and I know that's a pain for people trying to contact us but we really do get absolutely hammered with spam, I can't emphasise how hammered we get, so we have the support form if you fill this in both myself and Allen will get the message, there are no filters on this.  As for certain countries being banned I don't know a great deal about this as it's not really my field, but what I do know is this is for various reasons, sometimes it's because the country has no copyright laws, sometimes because their laws about credit card fraud aren't all we would like.  Steve