>Server at receiving end reports "user unknown." Global delete of bounced >address from our lists finds "no action taken." Is the most likely >scenario that a user subscribed under one address, had mail forwarded to >another address without signing off the list, then signed off the second >address? That'd be my first guess, particularly if there are repeated bounces. >Any other scenarios? It could be that the machine issuing the bounce isn't reporting the actual email address that the message was sent to for mysterious reasons of its own. Alternatively it could be that someone else removed the subscription before you got to it. Sysadmin at the bouncing address could have issued an UNSUB command from the bouncing address, another listowner could have deleted it, etc.... If you have changelogs enabled you could search those to see if there's any record of a subscription for the email address in question. >Short-term solutions? Use the SCAN command to find various permutations of the email address. If the user's name was included in the bounce search for variations on that too. If the email address is from a relatively uncommon domain (I wouldn't recommend doing this with an aol.com bounce) you could do a SCAN to find all subscriptions from that domain and either look them over or do a few searches to see if there's anything suspicious there. >Long-term? Can the manager set all lists to periodic quiet probes? This is done on a list-by-list basis (though for lists less than a certain size quiet probing is enabled by default) but this is probably what I would recommend. The most effective way to get bad addresses off your mailing list is to have people renew their subscriptions every so often (Renewal= Yes). This may not be appropriate for some mailing lists, however. If you've got passive probes enabled LISTSERV should find the vast majority of bad addresses for you. Of the remainder that you have to deal with manually it should be possible to figure out what subscription the vast majority correspond to. Occasionally you may run into a bounce which simply does not contain enough information for you to figure out what the offending subscription is; there's not much that can be done about this, but fortunately the situation is very rare. Thanks, -- Jacob Haller, Technical Support L-Soft international, Inc http://www.lsoft.com/