Eric (Johnson, just so it's clear I'm not responding to the boss :) ),

1) We do monitor the list, but perhaps our current group of engineers do not do so as assiduously as some of our former engineers used to.  That's at least partly because our long-standing policy regarding this list (as well as toward LSTSRV-L, which, being really oriented toward LISTSERV maintainers (AKA postmasters), is why LSTOWN-L was spawned off of it many years ago) is that it's a self-help list, where L-Soft engineers may jump in from time to time as time allows.  

Also, the list does not see the kind of traffic that it used to, particularly not the sort of traffic that it has prior to 1993-1994 when L-Soft was organized and formal support began.  The list has handled only about 50 messages in all of 2019.  Our engineers keep quite busy sorting out problems in the official product and hosting support streams and the occasional message here may not always get the sort of scrutiny that it deserves.

As the support department manager, I will see what I can do to help prevent questions on this list from being, hmm, "orphaned" without a response.

However, note that I responded to a question last week myself.  Liam Kelly responded to a question in August.  Michael Shannon (though he most recently posted from a personal email address) is an L-Soft support engineer who monitors the list, and Ben Parker, who retired a couple of years ago, seems to still be active here.  Some of our retired customer contacts also still read the list (Pete Weiss immediately comes to mind).  Please bear in mind, though, that a list owner's main avenue for support is to work through their site's LISTSERV maintainer (or in the case of L-Soft hosted lists, through the address they have been given for support of those lists).

2) Not having seen the full headers on the message myself, the only thing I can suggest is that the message was hung up in a queue somewhere between L-Soft and the eventual recipient, and a mail server reboot or some other action simply dislodged it.  Depending on how that happened, it's possible the message could have looped back through the list.  We see that sort of thing from time to time and basically it's just a head-scratcher as to how a mail server could punch out an old message like that.  They're just zombie messages from the Internet, or whatever you want to call it, I guess.

This list does have the full suite of LISTSERV loop-checking heuristics enabled, so if it did go through the list a second time, it must have been an unusual circumstance.

Nathan Brindle, Senior Product Engineer
L-Soft international, Inc.

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