On Wed, 27 Oct 1993 08:35:08 CST "George R. Bancks" <[log in to unmask]> said: >Now if I had a QUERY subscribed users for my node, I could perform the >command only once a week/month. Unfortunately, the overhead for netwide QUERY is not significantly less than for netwide DELETE, once you take into account the fact that netwide DELETE only needs to be issued once at the end of the semester. In both cases, all LISTSERVs have to run a job, and examine all their lists. In the case of netwide DELETE, LISTSERV's caching mechanism eliminates the need to perform any I/O in most cases, although in some cases it will be necessary. For a netwide QUERY, all lists have to be read sequentially. This is because hostnames can have aliases and can be changed automatically, and they are thus not suitable for use as a key field. >So we are back to solving problems after they happen instead of using a >little foresight and fixing problems before they happen. But I don't see a bounced message as a "problem". A continuous stream of bounced messages for the same userid would be a problem, but not a couple individual ones. Most mail systems let you forward a copy of all bounces generated by your mailer to a local account. You can run a program periodically that checks the mail of this account, detects cases where the 'Return-Path:' field is of the type 'owner-xxx', and sends a suitable SIGNOFF command. It is really not that complicated: Return-Path: <[log in to unmask]> -> Send mail to some.edu with the command 'SIGNOFF HELLO' You will want to log that action so that your program doesn't send 10 SIGNOFF HELLO commands in a row, but that's about it. Eric