> So it would seem that listserv is dropping trailing blanks.

If you write to LISTSERV@xxx for the purpose of executing commands, the lines of text in your message are processed as commands, where white space is not significant. So indeed leading and trailing blanks are dropped, among other things. And as you noticed, LISTSERV stops on dash-dash-EOL as well as dash-dash-space-EOL since the space is sometimes removed. I don't see a problem with any of that. LISTSERV does not strip trailing blanks on postings sent to the list for redistribution.

  Eric