>I figured out an acceptable solution--what I am basically trying to do is >to allow someone to put documents in folders in their mailbox and have >them either displayed (#INCLUDE) or linked (#dir_list) but with a web >pagesurrounding them other than the spiderisland template page. My >preference would have been to locate these spml pages in a place other >than the person's mailbox, so that there would be no chance of them >being lost or damaged--this now seems impossible and it is a very >rankling limitation.
You can put a Templates folder with customized dir.spml, topic.spml etc into each user's personal web space. Will that work for you?