Someone wrote to bit.admin on Netnews that files from Listserv with text such as the following should not be gatewayed into Netnews. remote execution [uucp job rtiAYVz3 (4/24-19:48:25)] rmail sas.com!snoklf exited with status 1 I wrote back asking what algorithm he suggested I use (as there obviously is none). Here is his response. Comments? The fault here is probably with the list, not the gateway. Properly configured mailing list do not spew transmission errors back to the sender of the original message; rather, these failure notices get reflected back to the owner of the list, who (presumably) can deal with them sensibly. Here's a message from Louis Mamakos on the subject, giving instructions on how to do things properly (in sendmail terms). I don't know how to configure a bitnet mailer to do the same, but that's probably not impossible. To: [log in to unmask] Cc: [log in to unmask] (D. Crompton) Subject: Re: Returned Mail??? Date: Sat, 03 Feb 90 09:40:46 EST From: "Louis A. Mamakos" <[log in to unmask]> Yes, I've been getting a few nasygrams back for each message that I send to the list. I shudder to think how many are being bounced to [log in to unmask] that Brian has to deal with. I run the NTP mailing list and I've been getting a little nasty lately about broken addresses on that list. Especially annoying are people that redistribute the list locally, but don't hack the SMTP MAIL FROM:<> command to supply a reasonable address for advisories to be returned to. FYI on your UNIX/sendmail box, if you are going to redistribute a mailing list locally, do something like this in /etc/aliases (or /usr/lib/aliases): mailing-list-inbound:"|/usr/lib/sendmail -fmlist-relay mlist-outbound" mlist-relay: postmaster mlist-outbound: foo, bar@baz, curly, moe, larry owner-mailing-list-inbound: mlist-relay owner-mlist-outbound: mlist-relay This will cause most errors in the redistribution to be returned to "postmaster" or whomever you've stuck with being on mlist-relay. You don't want to return errors to the original sender or worst of all, to the mailing list itself! A lession to keep in mind before we build elaborate auto-forwarding mailing list creatures over packet radio system where bandwidth is at a premium right now. And no, the solution to THIS problem is not faster modems! louie