> Although I had issued the "SET LIST" command as
> suggested in the LMail documentation, all of my lists had aliases
> (list-id) that did not match the actual eight character name defined in
> VM. Issuing a SET FORWARD for the list-id resolved the problem:
> 
> SET LIST FOR 8-char-name
> SET FORWARD [log in to unmask] FOR list-id
> 
> I don't know why LISTSERV didn't make the connection between list name and
> alias but I suppose it has something to do with the way LMail re-writes
> the message.

The list-ID feature was originally introduced when LISTSERV only ran on VM, and its purpose was to provide support for list names longer than 8 characters. Every list still had to have a name that was a valid CMS filename, but in addition you could define a longer name, or one containing reserved characters. The logical way to implement support for incoming mail was to simply forward the long address to the short address, which people were already doing before the feature was added.

Of course, for non-VM users, the list-ID feature is just a way to provide an alias for a mailing list. This can be useful when merging two lists or the like. But technically, you are still supposed to forward the list-ID to the canonical name, not the other way around. I think it works either way on some non-VM systems, but on VM it doesn't. It's just the way it is, support for direct delivery to the list-ID could only be implemented in the case where the list-ID happens to be 8 characters or less, so it would only work in a handful of cases and would be more confusing than helpful. Once you know that list-ID was added to provide support for long aliases, it is easy to remember which address should be forwarded to the other.

  Eric