15 April, 1999 Ottawa Canada

Have you ever had someone complain about not receiving a response to their
subscribe request?  I did and tracked down the cause by reviewing the
subscriber's RFC822 message headers and conducting a brief test.

Symptoms: Subscriber was not receiving any response at all to his
subscribe command sent to [log in to unmask] which is listserv 1.8C
for VM I believe.  Not sure if any other Listserv commands gave him a
response.

When he wrote to me his message headers were: >from: [log in to unmask] >to:"
[log in to unmask] >reply-to: [log in to unmask]

Do you know why he didn't get a response?

After sending a subscribe to the Listserv with a reply-to: line I found
the Listserv was sending its reply to the address given in the FROM: line
instead of honoring the REPLY-TO: address.  Seems my subscriber's mail
system was not accepting mail sent to the FROM: address but happily
received mail sent to his REPLY-TO: address!

I pointed out the difference in his from and reply-to addrresses and that
his system was trashing mail sent to his from: address and not notifying
the sender.  I wrote to him at both his addresses and he only received my
letter sent to his reply-to address.

So if you get complaints like this, be advised it is possibly a bad from:
address in the sender's message to Listserv.

IS THIS A BUG in LISTSERV 1.8C for VM?

Probably not.  It is reasonable to expect the message sent to the Listserv
to contain a valid from: address and makes sense for the Listserv to reply
to the from: address as many mail systems let the user specify any
reply-to: address they want.

I've only seen a couple of instances of mail systems insisting on mail
being addressed to the reply-to:" address and sending mail addressed to
the from: address into the bit bucket, but when you run into it it does
take a bit of testing to track down.

Brian