Dear colleagues:
 
I am the owner of a large distribution list (307 recipients) where the
subscribers have many different kinds of mail systems and protocols.
They use NJE, SMTP, X.400 and VMS-Mail at least.
 
Recently I had problems because some users want to distribute MIME messages,
and LISTSERV discarded the MIME headers before distributing. Using the
FULLHDR option solved the problem.
 
Now, I got another problem. Some of the subscribers (notably the X.400 people)
can request an acknowledgement (delivery notification report) and some of them
do it by default all the time. This was not a problem for my list, because
LISTSERV was sistematically discarding all the X.400 garbage from the message
header, but now with FULLHDR ON, this X.400 information is preserved and
passed thru LISTSERV to the X.400 destinations, with the disturbing result
that *every* delivery notification is received by the 307 subscribers, not by
the author. One of those messages is the following:
 
 
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
     X-Envelope-to: [log in to unmask]
     Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
     Message-type: InterPersonal Notification
     X400-Content-type: P2-1984 (2)
     X400-MTS-identifier: [/PRMD=es/ADMD=mensatex/C=es/;940909092943]
     X400-Originator: [log in to unmask]
     X400-Recipients: [log in to unmask]
     References: <[log in to unmask]>
     Message-ID:   <[log in to unmask]>
     Newsgroups:   bit.listserv.whoiswho
     Date:         Fri, 9 Sep 1994 09:29:43 +0000
     Reply-To:     Personas relacionadas con RedIRIS <[log in to unmask]>
     Sender:       Personas relacionadas con RedIRIS <[log in to unmask]>
     From:         [log in to unmask]
     Subject:      X.400 Inter-Personal Notification
     X-To:         [log in to unmask]
     To:           Rogelio Montanana <[log in to unmask]>
 
     Your message to: "(Miguel A. Garcia Lax)" <[log in to unmask]>
     was delivered at  9 Sep 94  9:29 +0200
 
     This notification was generated Automatically
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 
Now, I can envisage four possible solutions to this problem:
 
a) Supress FULLHDR for those users with delivery notification functionalities.
   This is not nice since it will prevent them from using MIME, and will
   requiere some kind of manual control on the subscription options that any
   user can have.
 
b) Request those users to disable the delivery notification option when sending
   messages to LISTSERV. This is not a safe solution since we rely on the
   user's goodwill and awareness.
 
c) Configure recipient's mail user agents in such a way that delivery
   notifications are sent to the author of the article, not to the
   sender (the list itself). I have been told by mail experts that this
   is not possible since delivery notifications *have to be* sent to the
   sender.
 
d) Have LISTSERV to honor delivery notification requests. As an
   additional safeguard, LISTSERV should prevent delivery notification
   messages from being distributed, by filtering them and sending an
   explanatory message to the originator (something similar to what is
   made now when a user tries to distribute the same text twice thru
   the same list).
 
Comments? Has other people experienced this problem?
 
Regards,
---
Rogelio Montanana, System Analyst         Tel:+34-6-3864310 Fax:+34-6-3864200
Valencia Univ. Computer Center                   Bitnet: montanan at evalun11
Dr. Moliner, 50                                Internet: [log in to unmask]
46100 Burjassot                 Hepnet: evalun::montanan (or 16530::montanan)
Spain               X400: C=es;A=mensatex;P=iris;O=uv;OU=ci;OU=vm;SN=montanan