> Let's suppose my organization is divided in four parts (well, in fact, it
> *is* that way!) and I want to put all the people here in four lists, say,
> LIST1, LIST2, LIST3, and LIST4. I also want a GENERAL list that includes
> them all.
>
> I know I can simply define all four sublists in the GENERAL one, but I
> don't want to, because:
>
> 1. I want the archival of messages to GENERAL to be distinct from those for
> LIST1, LIST2...; if the sublists are subscribed to GENERAL, there will be a
> duplication (a quintiplication? (-: ) in the log files of all messages sent
> to GENERAL.
 
Disk space is cheap.  :-)
 
> 2. That way, when a message is sent to GENERAL, the header will include the
> name of a sublist instead of the name of the general list; this would be
> confusing because one would not know the real extent of the distribution of
> the message, and also when when replying.
 
If you have Reply-to=List,Respect on all the lists, then, in the normal case,
where the sender did not put in a Reply-to header, the one inserted by
LISTSERV will be for the GENERAL list.  The Sender and To headers will
be for the sublist.  So the information will be there, although perhaps
not immediately obvious.
 
Also, you might check out IETFHDR.  I think it will preserve the name of
the list that the message was originally sent to in the To header, although
I haven't verified that.
 
> On the other hand, I would prefer not to explicitly signup everybody to the
> GENERAL *and* the proper sublist, because of the administrative overhead
> and forgetting to carry changes over to the other list.
>
> Any ideas?
 
The only other idea I can think of is to create an automated procedure
to build the GENERAL list from the sublists.