At 5:40 PM 8/14/95, Chris Barnes wrote: > We very nearly lost ALL Lsoft products for this >year because the unix bigots tend to love the freebe products (never >mind performance). $550 isn't a 'only costs' here anymore. It gets >compared to other software that's free (fair or not). The only freebie that can remotely compare to Listserv is listproc 6.0c. I have used both, and am now VERY much in the listserv camp. Management love to point out hidden costs, so throw this back at them: I spent about an hour per week just supporting configuration changes from list owners -- listproc doesn't let owners configure their own lists. I spent an average of two hours per week (really about 8 hours once a month) fixing listproc when it broke. So, let's be conservative and say that a person familiar with listproc would spend 2 hours per week to maintain it. At the moment I spend an average of about 30 minutes a week doing overall listserv maintainence, and that's mostly from installing new versions of the software every so often, and creating new lists (which takes about 5 minutes). Figuring that the company I work for charges $175 an hour for my time, which is cheaper -- hiring a listproc expert or getting a program that works? Oh, and did I mention that before I was really familiar with listproc I probably spent 4 hours a week on it, excluding the first week when I spent 15 hours getting the first list to work. Time is money -- tell your accountants that. Lee Silverman [log in to unmask] http://www.netspace.org/users/lee/ Someday we're going to look back on all this and tape over it.