At 8:37 PM 7/17/95, Winship wrote: >I mentioned the 4 hour stuff as it is relatively new You're showing your age, Doug... :-). Sending non-delivery warning messages after 4 hours is part of the "default" configuration for Sendmail 8.6.x, and is often set in Sendmail 5.65 (+/- IDA). One of these two versions ship with almost every commercial version of Unix, and are widely used on free versions of Unix such as Linux or NetBSD, making sendmail the most widely used mail distribution program used on Unix systems and probably on the internet as a whole. The reason that these errors seem "new" is that a lot more people are using Unix systems these days than they were 5 years ago or even two years ago, and there are a lot more unix installs of Listserv than there were five years ago as well :-) Conversely, the number of VMs that are actively used by individuals has been decreasing for the last five years, and LMAIL doesn't generate the warnings we're complaining about (I don't think... it's been a while). Often, the 4 hour warning will come *from your local system*. Look carefully. The message will be addressed from [log in to unmask], and will say "Cannot deliver mail to so and so: connection defered". This basically means that the internet connection to the destination machine is down, which is never a suprise on the Internet. It seems to happen more in Europe and the Far East than it does in the US. In any case, sendmail on your local machine is telling you that it can't connect and it'll keep trying for (typically) 5 more days before bouncing the message back to you as undeliverable. If you consider this a problem, you can bug your sysadmin to change it. I have sendmail on NetSpace configured to send a warning after a day -- that way users will know that their mail to a friend may not have gotten through, but listowners aren't inundated with warning notices -- things often go down for a few hours but not as often for a full day. "Real" remote warnings are often the fault of the user. If the machine running Listserv can send mail to the remote machine, and the *remote* machine's mailer cannot deliver it, it's generally some kind of quota problem -- the user has used up their allocation of mail or disk space. This seems quite common on AOL, as we've already discussed in the past months. The most recent post on this subject complained primarily about sites that send out acknowledgement of mail reciept and other such niceties. There, I can't help you, except to say that procmail for Unix and the commercial version of Eudora for Mac and Windows have filtering capabilities that I take advantage of for exactly this kind of nonsense. >One postmaster has deigned to answer my plea for mercy, said it's part >of sendmail 8 and maybe the next version will handle list mail better. >Wonderful, what about now? You can spew technobabble at him. Tell him to edit his /etc/sendmail.cf file and change the line that says OT5d/4h to: OT3d/1d I haven't heard anything about changes in delivery warnings for sendmail 8.7... Lee Silverman [log in to unmask] http://www.netspace.org/users/lee/ Live each day as if your life had just begun. -- Goethe