My poor e-mail program interpretted what Ed Paynter wrote as:

>At 11:22 AM 5/4/98 -0400, John Bachman wrote:
>(snip)
>>Do any of you who have experience with TOPICS have any advice about it.
>>Pros, cons, things to watch out for?
>
>TOPICS works exactly as advertised. Education of, and follow through with,
>subscribers will decide if your "topics" list works well. Non-use of topics on
>messages by senders, and readers not "SET"ing topics for themselves will
>reduce the usefulness of the

Note that this paragraph got cut off right here.  Technically, it all came
through to my e-mail program as one long line without a hard carriage
return and/or line feed coming through.  I'm noticing more and more of
these type of things, particularly from list software generated mail which
I have asked to recieve from various commercial entities.  Still, it makes
it awfully annoying to come across an e-mail message I can't read.

Is there any chance that L-Soft could implement some sort of list variable
to parse lines that come through to a list at a fixed width, and have that
be a list variable....something perhaps like:

* Line-Length= 80

to have no lines come through a list which are longer than 80 characters
without having them split into 2 or more lines?

>One of our list owners set up their list with topics and disallowed (by rule)
>anyone from selecting the "OTHER" topic. In the LIST file, DEFAULT-TOPICS= was
>set to the full list of "real" topics. Periodically they would send:
>
>  SET listname topics= -other for *@*
>
>This way, messages sent without a correct topic are not delivered (except to
>those set to DIGest at day's end).
>
>Ed Paynter
>[log in to unmask]

Since no other line in Ed Paynter's e-mail was longer than 255 characters,
I was able to manually parse it with this obsolete e-mail program I am
forced to use.

Anyway, just a suggestion.

Glenn