Here at Temple, we maintain a Web site at http://www.temple.edu/phonebook
which allows members of the Temple community to voluntarily register their
e-mail address and other contact information. When we first set up this
facility, we built in an annual expiration date for each entry. Now,
approx. 600 entries have expired. The data are all stored in an msql
database on a Sun system running Solaris.

We originally planned on asking everyone with an expired entry to visit
the Web site and renew it, but I proposed to do something quite different
to handle expired entries. My idea is run a test of each entry in the
database to be sure the e-mail address that corresponds to it is still
available. If the test fails, we would delete the entry from the msql
database.

What I hope to do is use our Listserv for this task. We use Listserv 1.8d
on a Unix box. My plan is to dump all the expired entries to a file. This
file can than be used to quietly add the expired entries to a Listserv
list that we would set up just for this purpose. We would than send out a
probe message to the list and wait a few days to see which subscriptions
Listserv deletes from the list. After a few day's time, we would output
the resulting Listserv list's subscriptions to a text file and compare it
with the original file that was used to create the list. We would than use
a Unix script to delete any entry from the input file that does not appear
in the output file we got from Listserv. We want to automate this task so
it can be run once a month and before each new batch of expired addresses
is added to the list, we would issue a "quiet del" to clear out the
previous batch of addresses from the list.

What we need to do is customize the probe message to say a few things
about why it was sent and that the user need not do anything if the user
wants to renew his or her database entry on our Web site. We also want to
send the probe from one address, but have any responses from confused
users go to the address for our help desk. I am a little uncertain as to
the feasibility of this idea and how to set up the list. If anyone has any
thoughts on this matter, please let me know.

Thanks