Michael sent me a copy of the original message as it was in his mailbox, and I now understand what happened: probably because of the SP5 spool bug DEARN was experiencing, MAILER had sent a piece of mail to LISTSERV with headers from one of my messages (possibly something left over from the last mail, without an appropriate SPOOL cuu PURGE), and a complete BSMTP header + RFC822 header + body from another message which shouldn't have gone there at all. One mistery solved :-) I also wish that V2 still had VMC and VMB. The former for performance, and the latter for compatibility with those RSCS emulators which rely on VMB. Besides, VMB is much more efficient than NJE (eg it can mix messages and files in a given buffer), but that's another problem. Nevermind. Eric