I'd like to add that I have (now useless) execs which read the lists to
find nomailed etc. subscribers.  Of course, I admit it's unsupported and
I don't have much of an argument here, but I did find the plain-text codes
as well as the dates, to be useful.  (The dates were used as tie-breakers,
for example, to decide which of one subscriber's several addresses was the
active one.)
 
I think the fuss here isn't that they are encoded but rather over the removal
of an easily program-parsable source for that info.  The output of the QUERY
command simply is not easy to parse, and *that's* what's making my life
difficult.  IMHO, QUERY output is nice and friendly for humans with the
occasional query.  It ceases to be friendly when there are enough replies
that you need to machine process the returned results.
 
Bill
City University of New York