On Tue, 20 Aug 1996 21:02:29 EDT Roger Fajman <[log in to unmask]> said:
 
>OK,  but  I  don't  understand why.  The  userids  listname-REQUEST  and
>OWNER-listname   worked  fine   for  us   with  Xmailer.   Why  wouldn't
>listname-SEARCH-REQUEST have worked too?
 
LISTSERV  would  use  the   listname-SEARCH-REQUEST  method  if  you  had
configured NDMAIL  = 1 in  LOCAL SYSVARS or if  it had detected  that its
mailer was LMail. If you ran XMAILER without NDMAIL = 1, it would use the
safer method with  the database job. Originally  everything was subjected
to NDMAIL = 1, including owner-xxx and xxx-request. Then LISTSERV started
using  owner-xxx  and  xxx-request  regardless of  the  setting,  due  to
increased complaints from Internet sites.  At the time both XMAILER R2.10
and LMail were free and supported, and people just who didn't "have time"
to install  either of  them and  were creating  problems for  other sites
needed some  kind of  incentive to  do so. For  INDEX, LISTSERV  was more
conservative as the lack of  xxx-search-request would mean that INDEX was
inoperative. The worst  that can happen with a missing  owner-xxx is more
load on  the local machine  and on machines trying  to bounce mail  to it
(which means more  complaints to the person who doesn't  have the time to
fix it), and a non-working xxx-request means complaints to the POSTMASTER
address. A  non-working INDEX mode would  have meant complaints to  me to
undo whatever change made it stop working, and there's nothing I could do
about upgrading the mailer at that site.
 
  Eric