> >In general, there's no guarantee that mail will arrive in the order
> >that it was sent or be processed by LISTSERV in the order it was
> >received.  So it's not good to depend on that.
>
> Maybe, I did not explain clearly enough what I have done. Therefore,
> I will describe my test in more detail. I have sent the following commands
> in *one* single message to our local [log in to unmask]:
>
> get sigi-l (header
> unlock sigi-l

I think it's already been made quite clear that using the:  get list (head nolock
command is the only recomended and supported way to getting the header
and keeping the list unlocked.... certainly for the obvious reason.

Why you insist on sending two (and longer) conflicting separate commands
in the same message is beyond me. My guess is the problem with your way
to do this has to do with Listserv trying to process two (or more) conflicting
commands in the same message. At times when Listserv is busy it may be
still trying to GET and LOCK the list while it trys to execute the UNLOCK
command. This is why the commnds don't always yeild the same results in
the order they were given. I'm sure Lsoft discovered this long ago and why
this method is not recommended.