In article <[log in to unmask]>, "Terry Kennedy, Operations Mgr"
<[log in to unmask]> says:
>
>  Mail LISTSERV sends out for this list comes back with a bounce that says
>"[log in to unmask] - no such user". When REVIEWing the list, this address
>doesn't appear, because it's the result of forwarding that LISTSERV doesn't
>know anything about.
>
>  The DISTRIBUTE method that was suggested instead of probes will suffer from
>the same problem, as there isn't any way to identify which list subscriber
>the bounce pertains to, right?
>
>  With probes, LISTSERV puts the subscriber address (with things like @'s and
>.'s escaped) in the From: address, so when it gets a probe bounce, it knows
>exactly which subscriber the bounce is for. That's much more useful. That's
>also why wildcard owner-* aliases are needed for probes to work (and hence
>my Sendmail patch to implement same).
 
What is not clear to me is if the DISTRIBUTE MAIL bounces
w/o a clear source of the problem child, why is it that the
PROBE feature will be any better in revealing that same
problem?  Won't the FROM: be just as easily managled,
hidden? (As Mark indicated, this was a semi-automated
method of REVEALing the bad address, not the be-all and
end-all in list management).
 
BTW, less it was unclear, the manually submitted DISTRIBUTE
MAIL job is generating individual TO:'s unless the person
sending the DISTRIBUTE job changed all user names to the
uppercased string BSMTP.
 
Another method of on-demand probes that I've had variable
success is to do a
 
SET listname SHORT822 FOR *@*problem_domain
QUIET SET listname SHORT FOR *@*problem_domain
 
(care needs to be taken for Usenet gateways).
 
Successfully used this technique this a.m. to find some
non-specific bounces.
 
--  co-owner:   INFOSYS, TQM-L, CPARK-L, ERAPPA-L, JANITORS, LDBASE-L, et -L
URL:mailto:[log in to unmask]                "I get paid by the millisecond"