I am trying to address all the comments made under this thread in a single message. I am also trying to address the issues rather than answer individual inflammatory comments, so I have purposefully chosen not to attribute the text I am quoting.

> if an MTA bounces a message and includes the original message as
> a MIME attachment, then the bounce message is sent to the list. Ouch.

This would be a bug - please send more information and it will be fixed. This being said, I do not quite understand how it is happening, and in particular why it would be new in 1.8e. First, complying MTAs send the bounce to owner-xxx, not to the list. Second, bounces in standard format are identified and immediately processed as such. Bounces in non-standard format sent erroneously to the list have always been sent to the list when they could not be identified as bounces through the built-in heuristics - this is not new in 1.8e and is in fact inherent to the difficulty of identifying every possible type of non-standard bounce. Again, I need to see an example in order to give a better answer.

> Second, and more problematic for us -- the LISTSERV ignores the last line
> in a MIME body segment so that if a command is sent to the LISTSERV and
> the user does not hit enter at the end of the line (or his/her MUA does
> not do it automatically for him -- like Outlook), then the user will get
> back a message that there was no command in the message.

I believe this has been fixed:

18E-0004 02/06/01 [B] Mail to LISTSERV w/o CRLF before MIME boundary rejected

You can get the fix via the normal support channels.

>It was explicitely stated that the vaunted new LISTSERV antispam stuff
>would *NOT* work with UNIX.

I assume this was a reference to the anti-virus feature, rather than to the anti-spam changes, which does work on all operating systems.

LISTSERV supports the anti-virus feature on all operating systems for which the anti-virus software is available. Currently, this means Windows and Linux. One of the reasons we chose F-Secure is that they do support unix. Yes, it is only Linux, but this is already exceptional. The hard reality is that most anti-virus products work only on Windows (I am talking about typical anti-virus software in the $50 price range, I am aware of the fact that there is specialized software in the 4-figure price range that does support unix, but we cannot include that in the maintenance contract at no extra charge).

>Items for approval should *NEVER* be sent as "attachments" unless the
>listowner requests them to be sent so.  For such to be the default, and
>perhaps impossible to work around, is, in my opinion, inexcusable.
>Neither I, nor my lists, some of which have over 4,000 subscribers world
>wide, using all sorts of different systems, are interested in attachments:
>(...) Something which cannot be used unless you have the latest "gee-whiz"
>is useless

You do have the option of not receiving the postings in MIME: "Send= Editor,NoMIME".

The vast majority of list owners will allow attachments, at least on occasion (when there is a good reason). With the old review mechanism, the moderator received a large serving of base64 garbage and had absolutely no way to open the file. This would usually end with a private message to the poster asking for the file to be resent directly to the list owner, which is obviously not a very good mechanism. Although there have been many complaints about this change (which again can be undone), they come from a small fraction of the list owner community. The reality is that very few list owners use Pine and that we cannot prevent a majority of Outlook users from opening attachments just because it would require a small vocal minority of users to make a change to their list header. As for needing the "latest gee-whiz", good MIME programs have been around for at least 5 years, and very few PCs are older than that.

For the first time since 1986, it has been very difficult to get the software beta-tested prior to release. Very few of the traditional LISTSERV beta sites were able to actually run the beta. Although we did send quite a few beta kits, the majority were never installed, or at least not tested by more than a handful of people in the IT department. Most sites blamed job cuts, their workload or their new manager's fear of running beta software.

Even more surprising was the fact that it was mostly the academic customers who were unable to test the software. For the first time, the bulk of the testing was done by corporate sites, who have historically had a hard time justifying the use of beta software. The problem is that universities and corporate sites have a very different usage profile. Corporate users tend to use Outlook, Lotus Notes or similar products, so naturally they gave us feedback about how 1.8e works with these products. Pine may be popular in the academic world, but it is almost completely unknown in marketing or finance departments. In fact, you will hardly ever find a unix system outside of the IT department in the corporate world. Similarly, the bulk of our corporate clients run LISTSERV on Windows and this is what ended up being tested the most. Only one site tested the software on VM, and none on VMS. If, for any reason, a particular user community is unable to test the software, it will inevitably lead to more issues for that particular community.

To avoid misunderstandings, I will add that universities have been very interested in the anti-virus feature, in the enhanced attachment filter, in the content filter and of course in the enhanced web interface. There has not been a lack of interest in the new features in the academic world, but rather a lack of time or permission to run the beta live.

  Eric