On Thu, 17 Feb 2005, Rich Greenberg wrote:

>On: Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 08:02:24AM -0700,Charles Oriez Wrote:
>
>} pull your subscriber list. send personal emails, not list emails, and see
>} which ones bounce.
>
>All good suggestions from Charles, but let me add that if you do send
>out a personal email to each subscriber, make each unique.  I have done
>this a few times, and I make the subject "Test email to user@node" so
>when I get a bounce, I immediately know whos email is bounceing.

Fortunately, this situation does not happen often on my Listserv lists.
When it does, I first run an active probe of the list. More times than
not, forcing a probe will weed out the errant subscriptions. How to do
this is described in the list maintainer's documentation on L-Soft's web
site.

If a probe does not work, then I extract all the subscriptions in the
troublesome list and I write a little perl script that sends an email
to each subscriber. This email contains the subscriber's email address
in the subject line as well as the body. I put the address in both
locations because sometimes the bounces mangle the subject. If they
mangle the subject and the body of my test message, then I just ignore the
situation. Fortunately, this kind of drastic action is rarely needed.