At 08:14 PM 2/25/97 -0500, Norm Aleks wrote:

[snip]

>Hmmm.  Well, for a literal reading of the manual, *that* would be a good
>one.  But looking back at the logs I think I was wrong entirely about my
>loop idea.  I'd always assumed such a loop could happen, but though
>LISTSERV ignores everything after a '--' line in my mail, it flagged
>[log in to unmask] '--' as an error, same as you pointed out
>(maybe because there were no valid commands ahead of it, as a way to
>allow people whose required headers included -- to use LISTSERV?).

I'd just like to note here that it's quite possible that a line consisting
of exactly '-- ' (with nothing else on it) may be recognized as "start of
signature" (by convention); and, that trailing space *is* VERY significant.

Your quoted line didn't have a trailing space, but I can't tell from
here whether it was originally present or where it might have been
removed, of course.

The possible "confusion" between '--' and '-- ' may not be at all relevant
to what was going on, but I thought I'd mention it.  Many people don't
ever notice that the trailing space delimiting a signature is even there.

Cheers,
Stan ("no signature") Ryckman