15 April, 1999 Ottawa Canada Have you ever had someone complain about not receiving a response to their subscribe request? I did and tracked down the cause by reviewing the subscriber's RFC822 message headers and conducting a brief test. Symptoms: Subscriber was not receiving any response at all to his subscribe command sent to [log in to unmask] which is listserv 1.8C for VM I believe. Not sure if any other Listserv commands gave him a response. When he wrote to me his message headers were: >from: [log in to unmask] >to:" [log in to unmask] >reply-to: [log in to unmask] Do you know why he didn't get a response? After sending a subscribe to the Listserv with a reply-to: line I found the Listserv was sending its reply to the address given in the FROM: line instead of honoring the REPLY-TO: address. Seems my subscriber's mail system was not accepting mail sent to the FROM: address but happily received mail sent to his REPLY-TO: address! I pointed out the difference in his from and reply-to addrresses and that his system was trashing mail sent to his from: address and not notifying the sender. I wrote to him at both his addresses and he only received my letter sent to his reply-to address. So if you get complaints like this, be advised it is possibly a bad from: address in the sender's message to Listserv. IS THIS A BUG in LISTSERV 1.8C for VM? Probably not. It is reasonable to expect the message sent to the Listserv to contain a valid from: address and makes sense for the Listserv to reply to the from: address as many mail systems let the user specify any reply-to: address they want. I've only seen a couple of instances of mail systems insisting on mail being addressed to the reply-to:" address and sending mail addressed to the from: address into the bit bucket, but when you run into it it does take a bit of testing to track down. Brian