> A little while ago I asked the forum about 'ghost recipients'. Thanks to
> those of you who responded with comments and suggestions. Unfortunately my
> problem persists, and I grow weary my daily error digest reminding me of
> these folks. ANY suggestions are welcome:
>
> - these are email address that are not and have not been a member of my
> list for quite awhile (a year in one case). Persistent attempts to
> "delete/quiet delete" them results in a message which essentially says that
> it can't be done because they are not members of the list.
>
> - error messages do NOT come back from these addresses when postings are
> sent out.
>
> - the ONLY way I know the addresses reside somewhere is from listserv which
> daily generates the following error mesage: "Last error: 553 5.1.1 unknown
> or illegal user" for this collection of addresses.
>
> After a year of deleting these daily error messages, I figure there must be
> some way of getting rid of these folks. Help?
>
> Thanks
>
> Dan

The usual causes of this are (1) the subscriber has automatic
forwarding of his email to another address and that address is invalid,
or (2) the subscribed address is an alias for another address and the
bounces refer to the "real" address.

There are a few ways of dealing with this situation:

(1) Try to identify addresses on your list that are similar to the ones
generating the errors.  For example, if the userid is the same, but the
host is slightly different, that's probably the one causing the error.

(2) Change to use Probe for a while.  LISTSERV 1.8d has the new passive
probing feature, which is less intrusive to your subscribers than
active probing.

(3) Turn off auto delete (set Auto-Delete=No in the list header), so
that you can see the actual error messages.  The Received headers of
the returned message (if the message is returned), may give some
information about to what host the copy that bounced was sent.  That
can tell you what address on the list to delete.

If you wish, you can send a test message to the address you identify
before deleting it, to see if it bounces.

P.S. to L-Soft:  I wish that with Auto-Delete Semi-Auto, LISTSERV would
pass error messages for addresses not subscribed to the list to the
Errors-to address.  That would make this situation easier to deal with.