Here at Temple, we maintain a Web site at http://www.temple.edu/phonebook which allows members of the Temple community to voluntarily register their e-mail address and other contact information. When we first set up this facility, we built in an annual expiration date for each entry. Now, approx. 600 entries have expired. The data are all stored in an msql database on a Sun system running Solaris. We originally planned on asking everyone with an expired entry to visit the Web site and renew it, but I proposed to do something quite different to handle expired entries. My idea is run a test of each entry in the database to be sure the e-mail address that corresponds to it is still available. If the test fails, we would delete the entry from the msql database. What I hope to do is use our Listserv for this task. We use Listserv 1.8d on a Unix box. My plan is to dump all the expired entries to a file. This file can than be used to quietly add the expired entries to a Listserv list that we would set up just for this purpose. We would than send out a probe message to the list and wait a few days to see which subscriptions Listserv deletes from the list. After a few day's time, we would output the resulting Listserv list's subscriptions to a text file and compare it with the original file that was used to create the list. We would than use a Unix script to delete any entry from the input file that does not appear in the output file we got from Listserv. We want to automate this task so it can be run once a month and before each new batch of expired addresses is added to the list, we would issue a "quiet del" to clear out the previous batch of addresses from the list. What we need to do is customize the probe message to say a few things about why it was sent and that the user need not do anything if the user wants to renew his or her database entry on our Web site. We also want to send the probe from one address, but have any responses from confused users go to the address for our help desk. I am a little uncertain as to the feasibility of this idea and how to set up the list. If anyone has any thoughts on this matter, please let me know. Thanks