On Thu, 27 Feb 1997, David Kalins wrote:

> My question:  Why did this guy's mail bounce?  Under what circumstances
> does the OWNER-LISTNAME@HOSTNAME convention not work?  Do we have to do
> something on our system beside define the list owner(s) in the header of
> the list???

The correct address to contact a list owner is "listname-request@host" and
while this will usually first return a standard message explaining the
difference between "listname-request@host" and "listserv@host", the
message will nonetheless get through to the list owner(s).

On LISTSERV, the owner-listname address is usually a reserved mailbox for
mail delivery errors and equates to the address defined in the
"Errors-to" keyword in the list header.

When mail has been sent to the owner-listname addresses of lists I own, it
is usually delivered to me with a short note saying that LISTSERV believes
it to be a delivery error notification as it was sent to the reserved
mailbox. I do not know, however, whether it is sent to me in my capacity
as a list owner or in my capacity as the site maintainer of the lists.

I do not know why it actually bounced, or whether it actually bounced at
all (maybe LISTSERV sent a message saying that it was a reserved address
and the remote administrator thought it was a bounce), or maybe the
remote guy just typed it wrongly, as you suggest:

> Thanks in advance.  By the way, this person (the administrator of the remote
> system) never sent me his bounced mail, so I don't know whether he's really
> correct or whether he mis-typed something.

I hope this is at least partly useful,

John

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John Asher
Information Systems Manager, AIESEC United Kingdom
AIESEC LISTSERV Operations Team Leader
International AGIS Support Team Member
http://www.aiesec.org/uk/members/is/
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