On Thu, 13 Aug 1998 11:30:47 GMT+0 Peter Robinson said:
>First - how does one get useful statisitcs for a list (number of mailings etc).
>I've tried the STATS command but with no success (the site owner tells me that
>this command is not available - I don't know why).

As documented, STATS is only available for lists running on VM mainframes.
It was not (and probably won't be) ported to the non-VM versions of the
software because it was too BITNET-oriented.

When 1.8d is released it will be possible for you to keep a "change-log"
for your list that will contain this kind of data in raw form (i.e., you'd
have to write a script to put it into whatever form you wanted).  In 1.8c
about all you can do is parse the console logs (which most list owners
don't have access to).

>Secondly, what is the best way to subscribe multiple people to my list.

See chapter 4.3 of the List Owner's Manual for information on ADD IMPORT .

>Third - a real trivial one this but it bugs me and I wont sleep till I know the
>answer - when I receive mail from some lists it has in the TO field :
>
>To :  multiple recipients of list <listname>
>
>Whilst my list only has the listname (with no text before it).
>
>Can this be set by the list owner?

No.  The ones that have the "multiple receipients" are running on LISTSERV
1.8b or earlier.  The following is from the 1.8c maintainers' release notes:

 8. The 'To:' field in LISTSERV-style headers has been modified to remove
    the historical "Multiple  recipients of list" message.  The field now
    reads 'To: [log in to unmask]

I believe this was in response to user complaints...and actually it should
be saying something like "To: My list title <listname@hostname>", where
"My list title" would be the descriptive title of the list from the first
non-blank line of the list header.

Nathan