> q r all *
> ORIGINID FILE CLASS RECORDS  CPY HOLD DATE  TIME     NAME      TYPE DIST
> LISTTEST 0149 A PUN 00000017 001 USER 10/29 16:58:48 LBAAS     NOTE
> LISTSERV
> 
> (pun held so I could view the file)
> 
> q tag d
> PUN  000D TAG NOT SET

No I meant TAG QUERY FILE 149. Something tells me it will say:

*FROM* *FROM* SMTP2@MSACVM

> Hmm, the sales guy didn't mention the LMail prereq and the VM installation
> guide says it's "recommended" but not required.

What is supposed to happen when you try to buy LISTSERV for VM is that you are sold a package including both LISTSERV and LMail. I have heard salesmen call the package just "LISTSERV for VM" or "LISTSERV-TCP/IP," presumably because LMail is only available for VM and is a pre-req. I suggest you call your salesman and figure it out.

LISTSERV used to work with either LMail or XMAILER. The problems started when people used FAL without any mailer, especially old versions of FAL. At that point we made LMail a pre-req. Not everybody was using LMail though, so we informally supported XMAILER for customers who did not want to have to buy LMail. By now I am pretty sure that none of our customers is using XMAILER, so the wording in the documentation should be unambiguous. Sorry about that.

The fundamental problem with FAL is that mail to owner-listname and all the other extra mailboxes ends up in the bit-bucket. This means LISTSERV will never receive bounces and will have no way to know that an address is bad. Many of the newer functions will simply not work, for instance you cannot subscribe to a list by sending a message to listname-subscribe-request because this address will bounce. Finally you need a dummy VM account for every list and LISTSERV needs D privileges to poll them. With LMail this is only necessary if you want to allow SENDFILE of a non-mail file to a list, in addition postings are processed instantly, without having to wait for the polling to occur. Polling also consumes a lot of cycles for nothing if you have thousands of lists. The safest thing to do is to allocate a domain for LISTSERV and route it to a SMTP server that forwards all incoming mail to LMail. This way your production users keep using FAL for now. Actually, the main selling point of LMail was that CMS users loved the incoming mail notifications and the options you can set (eg PROFS format for OV users), but this would be a separate project.

  Eric