>Hi,
>
>Do the welcome and farewell messages have to include a "*" in
>every line, or just the first line?  Also, as the listowner, how
>can I view the messages the way a subscriber would?  This is
>important because for whatever reason there seems to be
>formatting changes from when I compose the message in Netscape
>e-mail,

I know exactly why you have those formatting irregularities, in part
because I have an antiquated e-mail system which requires a CR/LF pair
(as all of the OpenVMS system does, to my understanding), and the number
of times I have recieved messages from people which are unintelligible
because their mail program refuses to insert them automatically is far to
many for me to count.  In particular, I have a lot of problems with people
sending me e-mail from Netscape and Internet Explorer which I simply can
not read because they fail to include that good old-fassioned tap of the
enter key after every 0 characters or so.  It would seem that EDT, the
only editor which the VMS system here at Drew supports, is able to hold
onto 255 characters per line without chopping any off, but beyond that,
the only way to read the messages I recieve is to save them as files, and
then issue a type (similar to the Unix cat command and the DOS type
command) of the file.  Even then, if I edit the file a single bit on those
lines which are too long, I can not see what was there before.  I'd love
to be able to run scripts from my VMS account as I'd just write a C
program to parse a file of this sort for me without incident, but running
executables is not permitted on this server, and I have yet to see a COM
file which can do this sort of extensive file manipulation.

>to what actually gets distributed to new members (there
>seem to be line-spacing irregularities)  I've been having a
>friend subscribe/unsubscribe and then forward a copy to me, but
>we're both getting tired of this.

Subscribe yourself to a system which must abide by the CR/LF pair for new
lines.  You'll see pretty quickly just what your problem is.  Netscape
mail seems to parse every incoming e-mail the same way it would parse an
HTML file, except that there is no HTML encoding.  However, the
line-wrapping with Netscape mail is similar to that of how HTML is
defined, being that if it doesn't fit on one line, it will automatically
wrap to the next line.  Some systems are not so kind.

>Thanks for your help,
>
>Bret Diamond

You're most welcome.

Glenn Alperin