Hello,
when I was young (until yesterday) I believed that mail is handled as
punch files by Bitnet mailers (and Eric seems to share this believe).
Now I'm several years older and don't believe in nothing :-)  Here is
my war story.
 
I have installed a local redistribution for the Info-1100 Arpa list
(as I have heard from the list maintainer this list will soon be
redistributed by FINHUTC, but for now we receive mail directly from
Arpa-land). Yesterday the first letters came in and Listserv moaned
'Error 1 while punching data'. The mail was written correctly to Listserv's
notebook, but only the first member of the list has gotten a copy (complete but
a piece of information mail to the postmaster was appended). The original
mail was transferred to my (the postmaster's) reader. And this mail
was a *PRT* file. Now it is obvious what happened. The incoming mail
contains lines longer than 80 characters. Listservs has no problems
to read the file, append it to its notebook (recfm=v), but than it
attempts to PUNCH this beast to the list recipients. Due to the error
it aborts after the first recipient. What I don't understand is the
fact that the information mail was appended to this first outgoing mail
and was not sent to me.
 
The mailer which sends this PRT mail files is [log in to unmask]
Regardless whether it is ok to sent PRT-mail or not, Listserv should
be able to detect this situation and handle it gracefuly.
 
I have sent this to the list (instead of only as bug report to Eric)
because other sites which are redistributing stuff from the outer space
may be bitten by the same problem.
 
  Thomas