On Sun, 8 Dec 1996 18:40:36 GMT Daniel Norton said:
>"Peter M. Weiss +1 814 863 1843" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>Getting a Daily Error Monitor report does NOT mean that the
>>
>>1) userid@host per se is subscribed
>
>Kinda silly then.  IMHO, the daily error monitor should not monitor
>addresses that aren't on the list, since it can't do anything about it
>anyway.
 
It's not silly at all.  It's so you know it's happening so you can do
something about it.  It's most likely that someone on your list has
the subscribed address forwarded to another address that no longer
exists, and it's the non-subscribed address that's causing the error
condition.  This doesn't mean LISTSERV or you should simply ignore it
and let it keep bouncing.  You should do some detective work and figure
out which address on your list is causing this to happen.
 
For instance, you might have a subscription for [log in to unmask]  But
Joe, in his infinite wisdom, has decided that he wants all of his mail
to go to another address, [log in to unmask]  Instead of unsubscribing
from all of his lists (that would be too much trouble, and besides, Joe
doesn't remember all of his lists, and didn't keep the instructions for
unsubscribing anyway), he puts a .forward file in his directory on
his.host.net that points to [log in to unmask]
 
Then, months later, Joe gets ticked off at otherhost.com for some reason
and closes his account.  By this time he's probably got a couple of
other accounts, too, or maybe he just forgets that the .forward file
is there since he rarely uses his.host.net anymore.  So otherhost.com
drops Joe, but the list mail keeps coming, and otherhost.com keeps
bouncing it back to LISTSERV....but [log in to unmask] isn't subscribed
to the list, and the list owner starts tearing out his hair (in my case,
this phase doesn't take long, I haven't got much hair left).  You get
the idea.
 
If everyone just ignored this kind of thing, the Internet would soon be
choked with nothing but error messages caused by .forward files that
point to bad addresses...and this is only one possibility.
 
Of course, if you have subscription renewal coded for your list, eventually
the offending address gets automatically deleted, but that's not always
an option.
 
>What a PITA.  The only address that DEM catches is one that's not even
>on the list!  All the rest it doesn't recognize and passes on directly
>to me.  <grrrr>
 
Again, I'll bet the address it catches is actually the address the
subscribed address is forwarded to...
 
Nathan