There is a common mistake that many people make when trying to use blanche to add themselves to a list. Whenever using blanche, you should always make sure the list you want to add or remove someone from is the first thing after blanche on the command line. For instance, if joeuser wanted to add himself to the list named foo he should type: athena% blanche foo -a joeuser If he got the arguments to blanche in the wrong order, it is possible for him to accidentally add everyone on the list foo to his personal group. This is bad, because it means if he tries to use his group to control access to something all of the people on the list foo would have access to it. It is also bad, because it pollutes various databases, and can be an inconvenience to users on the list foo under certain circumstances. You can tell if you have accidentally added a list to you group by typing: athena% blanche $user By default the only thing that should be returned is your username. If something like LIST:foo is also returned, and you didn't add it on purpose, then you probably got the arguments to blanche wrong at some point. If joeuser had accidentally added the list foo to his group, he should do the following to correct the problem: athena% blanche joeuser -d list:foo athena% blanche foo -a user:joeuser The first command will remove the list foo from his personal group, and the second command will add him to the list foo, which is what he wanted to do originally.