It is unfortunate that LSoft bundles "backbone" and "Catalist". 

I don't want to deliver the mail of other LISTSERV sites, but find 
Catalist useful.

But the most annoying part of "backbone" for me wasn't X-SPAM, but the 
fact other LISTSERV sites were delivering (or not delivering) my 
outgoing mail.  The fix for me was to configure all lists with 
"Mail-Via= Direct", but I'd just as soon see most or all of the 
"backbone" disappear.  Though once useful, is the "backbone" more than 
an LSoft marketing tool to anyone now?

Thanks and cheers, wayne

Bill Verity wrote, in part,  on 9/13/2005 4:26 PM:

>I just submitted a de-register form to get off the backbone.  Got to try this for a while.  X-SPAM traffic has been killing us.  We generated 916 jobs yesterday that went to 216 sites as 140 jobs each.  That's around 140,000 jobs, if my math is right.  Took me hours to toss them all.  If you recall, I run a script every 15 minutes to look at all .mail files and delete any that contain X-SPAM.
>
>At 5:38 PM -0700 1/22/04, Ben Parker wrote
>  
>
>>On Thu, 22 Jan 2004 17:49:33 -0500, Paul Karagianis <[log in to unmask]>
>>wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>Is the above usable as an emergency on/off switch?
>>>      
>>>
>>No, especially if you are a registered backbone site (which STJOHNS is).  Each
>>LISTSERV site maintains (periodically updated) tables of the other backbone
>>sites to share the X-SPAM and other notifications, including DISTRIBUTE jobs.
>>Even if you set your server to STANDALONE, if you are in the registered list,
>>all other sites will continue to send you their notices, based on their local
>>tables.  You need to de-register from the backbone
>>
>>  http://www.lsoft.com/regform.html
>>
>>and then run in STANDALONE mode for 15-30 days before you can really feel the
>>effects of shutting this down.  And some older sites still running with
>>outdated tables, may still send you backbone traffic, even a year later.
>>
>>STANDALONE also removes your site from CataList (the worldwide list of
>>LISTSERV lists).
>>
>>This needs to be a carefully thought-out process, definitely not something
>>done in a hurry.
>>    
>>
>
>
>  
>