At 08:02 PM 4/7/97 +0200, Louise Parsons wrote:
>Greetings L-Soft Listowners & Maintainers!  I have a question which I have
>searched the manual for without success.  We have asked that our members
>provide geographic information within the forty character limit for the
>name field in our subscriber's list because we are a garden list and feel
>that this is necessary to the discussions of the list.  Sometimes Listserv
>plucks this information from our subscribers list and puts it in the
>"from:" portion of the header and other times it does not.  I cannot seem
>to discern any pattern to this.  For example, it used to put my own info in
>there and now it no longer does, but continues to use it for my
>co-listowner.  Does this depend upon the member's mail client or is there
>some way to get listserv to always include this information in the "from:"
>portion of the header as it appears in our list of subscribers?

We did a bit of an experiment a few months back... probably on this
list but possibly a different one.

Anyway, it depends on three things:
        1. If the receiver has selected the IETFHDR setting, they
           will only see what, if anything, the sender put into "name".
        2. Otherwise, if the sender has put something into "name",
           then that is what will be used.
        3. Otherwise, the sender has put nothing into "name", and the
           stored LISTSERV information will be used.

Note that by "name" for sender I technically refer to what is a "comments
field" in the From: header.  Most mail clients can control this.  In some
cases, though, attempting to have it empty will result in a default for
you that your sysadmin set up.

So, it primarily depends on the sender's mail client; I doubt whether any
of your subscribers would have set IETFHDR for any reason -- if they have,
then they probably have their reasons and you shouldn't try and reset
it for them (IMHO).

As for what you actually are trying to accomplish:

You might also consider either a .signature approach, or people voluntarily
putting in a first line of their posts with that information.  Neither,
of course, is reliable.  .signatures are often easier, but some mail
clients have difficulty using one sig for a list, another for a different
list, a third for regular mail, etc.; also, if people tend to have those
disgusting "quote the rest of the message" at the end, the sig may be
separated from the text by a wide gap of nothing but quoting.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Stan