On Thu, 5 May 1994 09:31:01 -0500 Bob Parks said:
>Thanks for those who took the trouble to educate me - flame or otherwise.
Think I'm "flame" :-)
>
>Can't listserv be taught to look for bounces, and automagically unsubscribe
>bounced  (or  set nomail or maybe a new set bounced)
Together with LMail  as mailer it does  exactly that. But this is  for - as
you mention - disappeared accounts, changed hostnames and the like.
With slow gateways or/and mail-daemons  which send the bounces elsewhere or
don't  flag it  with some  decent message  and destroy  all evidence  WHICH
message it was, you'd need an AI (or a good postmaster: back to square one).
  *mumble mumble, thought I have on of these X.400 gateway notices around*
Ok, you  have to believe me  that eg an X.400  message is a) 83%  pure junk
(the biggest section reads something like: "This information is directed to
the local X.400 administrator only" - heck,  what good is this on the other
side of  the gateway?), b)  the last  sentence usually reads  "the original
message is not  available". Now YOU figure out what  exactly bounced. Often
not even  an X.400  parser helps because  you only see  the results  of the
address-mapping: how can LISTSERV guess to whom this mail was directed.
And if the bounces go to the From: address or to the Reply-To: you're
more or less out of luck.
 
As for  numbers I don't bother  running tests. All I  know is that I  had a
dozen-odd cases  where addresses suddenly  started to bounce (bad  form), I
deleted  them and  not much  later they  tried to  subscribe again  but the
confirmation request again bounced.
 
Christian