On Fri, 12 Feb 1999 15:15:57 -0500 Stanley Horwitz said:
>Here at Temple, we maintain a Web site at http://www.temple.edu/phonebook
>
>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.

Sounds like a lot more work, than setting up your own probe
mechanism.


>
>Thanks
/ahw