Over the past few  weeks quite a number of people have  asked me why mail
from SEARN  lists suddenly  started showing up  as (say)  'OWNER-LS MAIL'
rather than 'LSTSRV-L MAIL' under RDRLIST. I guess it's time for a public
answer to save time to everyone.
 
A new  list header keyword, "Safe=  Yes/No", was announced quite  a while
ago. The change in spool fileid is due to a combination of the list using
"Safe= Yes" and the target site  running XMAILER. This is not the PURPOSE
of the "Safe= Yes" keyword, merely an unfortunate side effect.
 
A very good (but by no means sufficient) way to avoid mailing loops is to
set the address  to which delivery errors are supposed  to be returned by
non-broken,  conforming  mailers  to   something  other  than  the  list.
Obviously this special mailbox must work and somehow forward the error to
the  list owners  - not  just dump  it  into a  black hole.  This is  the
technique the Internet is using, and  because this is their only firewall
you will occasionally see serious  mailing loops on Internet lists, which
are then collectively  blamed on BITNET because  some understaffed BITNET
site happened  to run a  broken mailer  (usually vanilla VMSmail  with no
RFC822 mailer)  and obviously the  problem is due  to the IBM  culture of
BITNET (of which VMSmail and X.400 must be perfect examples ;-) ).
 
The reason LISTSERV did not originally take advantage of this firewall is
that there  was no reasonable way  to make it  work. In order to  use the
Internet conventions for  these mailbox names, a special entry  had to be
added to  the mailer's configuration files  for each and every  list, and
updated regularly  to reflect changes in  list owners. This could  not be
done without stopping the mailer, running a table generation program, and
restarting it. The functionality was available via the "Sender=" keyword,
but I don't know any site which  actually used it. Another way was to set
up a second LISTSERV  list and use that as sender. Quite  a few sites did
that for major mailing lists, but you double the amount of lists and then
where do you  get delivery errors for the second  list sent? In practice,
only a very small percentage of mailing lists were run this way.
 
Since release  1.7b, a  mechanism has  been available  for the  mailer to
forward messages to  owner-xxxx or xxxx-request to  LISTSERV, which would
then know  what to do  with them, and you  wouldn't have to  maintain the
information in  2 places or reboot  the mailer every time  the address of
one of the owners of your  150 lists changes. Unfortunately this required
a change to XMAILER R2.08 which very few sites installed.
 
This function is  now standard with both LMail and  XMAILER R2.10. Either
mailer will  become a  pre-requisite for being  on the  LISTSERV backbone
from the beginning of March, as  older versions of XMAILER do not support
lines longer than 80 and it is  high time we moved out of this ridiculous
restriction (due,  contrary to  what many people  believe, solely  to the
fact  that the  mailer did  not support  lines longer  than 80,  and that
application developers  ended up having to  write code to split  lines at
column 80 so they could be sent to the mailer). It will then be very easy
to add this new  firewall, and that is what "Safe= Yes"  is all about. It
will be the default option with 1.7f  if you are running LMail or XMAILER
R2.10,  so expect  most lists  to  start working  this way  within a  few
months.
 
Which  brings us  back to  the original  problem. When  BSMTP became  the
default delivery mechanism  many years ago, XMAILER  suddenly became less
user-friendly because  the BSMTP code  is generally more "lazy"  than the
old code. Where you used to get:
 
From XYZ(MAILER): * New mail from John Smith <[log in to unmask]>
 
you now get:
 
From XYZ(MAILER): * New mail from <[log in to unmask]>
 
But it's not  just that the name isn't shown:  the information comes from
another place  (which usually contains  the same thing). XMAILER  used to
scan the header and give you the "Sender:" field, or "From:" if there was
no "Sender:".  Now it  gives you the  BSMTP MAIL FROM:,  which is  just a
mailbox without name and which in  the case of "safe" LISTSERV lists will
be owner-xxx. LMail always scans the  header, so you will not be affected
if you run it. And of course  the message looks just the same once inside
your mailbox,  if you use RiceMail  to read it: the  only people affected
are those who use RDRLIST + RECEIVE and whose site runs XMAILER. The best
solution, if you can't  migrate to LMail, is an XEDIT  macro one can call
from  PEEK which  uses a  plain PUT  command to  log the  message into  a
notebook. Note  that RECEIVE  won't put the  Netdata files  XMAILER R2.10
generates into notebooks anyway, so lobbying the site running the list to
use "Safe= No"  just won't do -  at least not once John  fixes XMAILER to
actually deliver  in Netdata  format when  told to.  But, above  all, the
issue  is the  owner's convenience  vs yours  as a  subscriber. Very  few
people use PEEK+RECEIVE rather than RiceMail  to read their mail, and you
can't expect  the world to  adapt to their  specific needs. Before  I get
flamed,  that's how  I read  mail  myself (except  I never  use PEEK  nor
RECEIVE if I can avoid it ;-) ).
 
  Eric