> At this point, I'm tempted to suspect that there is a parsing problem in
> LISTSERV that treats the Hotmail-generated automatic signature /
> advertisement as the username field of the subscription request.  Because
> I do not know how to reproduce the problem myself, I can but hope that the
> LSoft staff might be able to guess where the problem might be and either
> fix the "SUBSCRIBE" command parser or offer a workaround.


If you send:  subscribe listname
LISTSERV will try to parse the address and the name from the From: field.
If no name is present, it will reject the subscription and bounce it back
to the subscriber stating they need a first and last name.

If you send:  subscribe listname first last, LISTSERV then only needs the
address which is never a problem.

Since this text is being added to every message and showing up as the
name, it's apparent LISTSERV is picking it up after the "subscribe
listname" command. This is happening when these subscribers don't use
firstname lastname in the command or have a name in the From: field of
their messages.

To test, remove your name from the account and send:
1.) subscribe listname
Then try
2.) subscribe listname first last
Add your name to the account and try step 1 and 2 again.

I suspect the only "work-around" will be they either have to add First
Last to their command or define a First and Last name in the account so it
shows in the From: field.