1) Why did LISTSERV reject the note?
 
  There  are two  different routines  in LISTSERV  (LSVXMAIL for  you LISTSERV
owners) that  process incoming mail files.  One for RFC822, one  for IBM NOTE.
You may  not realize it  but IBM NOTE is  *very* difficult to  parse. Remember
that I need  all the names and userid@node  of all the people in  To:, cc: and
From:, that there are two formats (SHORT  and LONG), that the name can contain
characters forbidden to  RFC822 like commas, parens, that in  SHORT form names
are separated  by commas,  and that a  lot of people  use locally  hacked NOTE
format. Not to mention those people who start typing their text just after the
"To:" line (ie no  blank line) because that's where the  input field starts in
XEDIT...
 
  All of this to say that the  fields *must* appear in that order: Date, From,
To, cc (optional), then any number  of supported additional tags in any order.
Additional tags are "Subject:", "Subj:"  and "Reply-To:" (not case sensitive).
The point is,  the IBM default official copyrighted original  tags must appear
first and  in the same  order as vanilla NOTE  would generate them,  and other
tags must appear AFTER them. I'm not too keen on modifying that section of the
code -- whatever I might do, I will unavoidably get into problems with ANOTHER
NOTE hack. You don't believe me? Some  french users have an exec to send NOTEs
with a  subject tag, "Objet:"  (that means "Subject:"  in french). Now  get me
someone to translate  all the possible tags in all  the possible languages :-)
Any unrecognized tag will be "Comments:"-ed out.
 
2) Why did Mark get a copy of the note?
 
  LISTSERV understood  that someone  intended to  send something  somehow, but
realized  that it  lacked the  intelligence to  go any  further. It  therefore
transferred the stuff to the postmaster,  who's supposed to send angry mail to
the sender or the author (according to  the nature of the problem :-) ) and/or
resend the stuff to the destination list using MAIL/MAILBOOK or suchlike.
 
  Eric