I apologize for asking a question that does not directly pertain to listserv and listownership. At my university we use several Robotics 28,800 baud modems for student and faculty access to our VAX/VMS system. The lines are unavailable most of the time for one of the following reasons: (a) someone has hung up without logging off, (b) someone has logged off without hanging up (the system remains online even after logging off), (c) the system has suddenly disconnected without apparent reason, resulting in condition (a) above, or (d) some other unknown problem. In cases (a) and (c) it is possible to call and suddenly find oneself in somebody else's mailbox without logging in at all. When that happens to me I log the person off and call back using my own user-id. I have avoided using the modems and generally telnet into the system from a commercial account but my students need to have access, particularly since I am involved in teaching a course via a listserv list in the Temple University system and they need to be able to exchange information with colleagues in other parts of the country. When I talk to our systems administrators they tell me that it's the users' fault who don't properly log off. That may be technically true, but we can't depend on people not making mistakes; furthermore, at least 20% of the time the University system disconnects on its own! I have modem access to at least five systems (including my commercial account), and ours is the *only* one where this happens regularly. Several of my students have switched to the commercial account in order to have regular access to Internet and the WWW). If anyone out there has any suggestions, please write to me personally. This will become even more critical as more faculty members become computer literate and start assigning cyberspace research projects. Thank you! Ingrid Shafer http://astro.temple.edu/arcc [log in to unmask] & [log in to unmask]