On Sat, 9 Aug 1997 11:56:22 -0400 Russ <[log in to unmask]> said: >My point, the routines should be able to accept an address exactly as >any of the other routines might return it. It's not that simple. Addresses are displayed using the RFC822 mailbox format, which is the way all mail programs are supposed to display them and the format that people will be expecting because in theory everyone has to use it. In some tricky cases this format looks weird per the rules in RFC822, and I don't think it would be appropriate for LISTSERV to invent its own non-compliant display format for this. The input format is different in these tricky cases because the commands are based on blank separated parameters, not on the RFC822 format where white space is allowed just about everywhere and you know the extent of the address portion advance (ie you don't have to decide "this is the end of the address and the beginning of the rest of the command"). Another reason is that the RFC822 quoting rules are known to be obscure and counter-intuitive and are not a good model to use for your command parser. Let's just say many mail products got it wrong because the developers could not understand them :-) Only ADD supports this input format, for convenience (and because it knows that the whole command line is a mailbox + name). LISTSERV uses a simpler system for command line arguments where you enclose things in quotation marks and there aren't 2000 sub-rules. If you don't want to learn this escaping sequence, you can use wildcards, which also saves typing. Eric