How about someone with a long FirstName and LastName trying to process a SUBSCRIBE command?  Or, less troublesome but still a potential issue, trying to run SET commands for subscription options and wanting to put several items on one command line.

I seem to recall vaguely that there is a section in one of the LISTSERV manuals that gives guidance on the choice of list names, and I believe (based on foggy memory, not wanting to look it up right now) that the 'recommendation' comes in somewhere around 32 or 40 characters  - and part of this is human nature, besides the technical limits on just how long the "To" field value (or a single line of body text) of an email is permitted to be - - who really wants to type an 80-character listname every time they send an email to it?

And how about all those other people in the world who use email software with line-breaking traits who do not have the option to switch machines, as you have done?

And there is a discussion in the manuals about how to break commands across multiple lines with certain specific requirements - but the users aren't likely to know how that works when all they want is to join or leave a list.

And there is the web management interface for the list server, which has fewer constraints than one encounters through the email interface - mainly since you're freed from email client software behavior.

>>> [log in to unmask] 08/23/01 10:59AM >>>
It turns out that my hateful email software is indeed splitting my line
lengths.  Thanks for steering me that way -- it's hell to locate where the
value is set, so I've been doing my listserv testing from an id on a unix
machine that at least has a mailer that preserves my lines as typed.

We have some long list names, and management wants to preserve the ability
to have list names as long as they like.  Well, not with listserv, they
can't.  Not if you can only create lists with job control files that have
100 as a maximum number of characters.

But it's less than 100.  Let's count down.
PUT [# of characters in listname].LIST PW=[# of characters in password]
     or
100-(13+length of password)

So 86 (or, more reasonably, 80) is the maximum number of characters in a
list name.  But maybe even that's optimistic.

I'm new at this, and I'm not familiar with all the listserv commands that a
user, owner, or manager might send.  Are there any that use the name of the
list in the message body that might bump up against that 100-character
limit as well?

Thanks again.

cheers, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Poole              [log in to unmask] 
Collaborative Computing - Watson I/S
T.J.Watson Research Center   tieline:  /862-3045,  external:  914-945-3045
PO Box 218, Yorktown Heights NY 10598