On Thu, 14 Sep 1995 12:10:43 -0400 Dave Lampson <[log in to unmask]> said: >Nathan, I would strongly urge *you* to take a look at your manuals. >Nowhere are the step-by-step mechanics of moderated lists covered. >There's plenty of stuff in there about philosophies and how to set up >the basics of the list, but nothing about how to actually edit and >redistribute the messages or what to expect when you do edit messages. There would need to be as many sets of instructions as there are major mail packages out there. The hard reality is that, while all the mail packages all have commands called "forward" or "resend" or "reply", they do very different things on different mail programs. There is no Internet standard saying what a command called "forward" should do, and each vendor has used his own definition, resulting in a total mess. Most mail programs do not even identify themselves, so there's no way for LISTSERV to compensate for known idiosyncrasies. >No, it is not that simple. If you "forward" the message back to the >list, then it appears that all messages posted to the list come from >you, and you get those nasty embedded headers. This is completely >unacceptable, and something even Majordomo is smart enough to handle >correctly. This isn't about being "smart" vs not "smart". There are a lot of ways for a mail program to "forward" a message. If you make a matrix of all the forward commands in the world vs all the mailing list managers in the world, and whether or not they work the way you want them to, you'll probably find a bunch of X scattered more or less randomly. >You can bounce mail, and that retains the header info and just adds the >"Resent-by" line and approval line. I assume that your mail program won't allow you to edit the message, so this doesn't work for you. Other mail programs allow you to edit the text when you "bounce" (an action which they may call "forward" or "resend"). Many (most?) mail programs don't let you edit headers at all, so there is no universal method that would work everywhere, except when you don't want to modify the message. Then LISTSERV can use the copy it had stored and there is no idiosyncrasy to worry about. Eric