On Tue, 16 Jun 1998 17:22:26 -0500 Curtis Larsen said:
>Can anyone explain to me more fully what exactly LISTSERV uses a
>subscriber's first and last name for?

It is as a convenience for the list owner.  Sometimes it's hard to find
a user by address (e.g., how do you know that [log in to unmask]
is Joe R. User's address?) and this just gives you more targets to shoot
for with the SCAN command.  For instance, Joe has his compuserve mail
forwarded to [log in to unmask] and can't get off the list, but
he's forgotten about the CompuServe account being forwarded and he's
being a royal pain in the a** about it.  So if you do a SCAN for "Joe User"
you're probably going to find him under the CompuServe address and be
able to delete him.  (I remember vividly a situation where a subscriber
SWORE that he had no other accounts, and in fact got quite shirty about
it, only to find out that gee, he did have another account and it was
forwarded to the account he was complaining from :)  After I deleted it
and told him about it, I never heard from him again:)

Back in the days B.S. (Before Spamming), a lot of lists were publicly
reviewable, and this was also a convenience for users who were just
interested in who was on the list.

>The main reason I ask is that we have some lists that we've maintained
>manually until now, and in converting them to our new LISTSERV we're not
>sure if we should do a "QUIET ADD <address> *" or not.  We have the
>e-mail addresses of course, but we don't know what effect (if any) not
>having some subscribers names will have on LISTSERV in managing the
>list.

If you're converting you should use the ADD IMPORT syntax shown in the
List Owner's Manual, I think it's in 4.3.

>We'd like to make the behind-the-scenes list management change as
>painless to our subscribers as possible, but in the long run would it
>eventually be better to send out one of those nice "Our list is moving
>so please SUB again" messages?

Not necessarily, as I've implied above it really isn't necessary to
have the users' real names (as long as you use ADD IMPORT or use the
wildcard with a regular ADD).  It's just convenient.

Nathan