I'm glad this topic was brought up... I was just trying to understand this
myself.

Jacob Haller wrote:

> It may help to think about this in terms of a discussion mailing
> list.  Say you've got a reasonably lively discussion mailing list
> that gets about 50 messages a day (with some really busy days and
> some days where nobody posts much).  The question is, how can you
> tell when an address is really bad?
>
> One method is to wait four days (or whatever) and see if the address
> is still bouncing.  This is the Delay() method.  (Note that with this
> method you're not counting bounces or trying to match them up with
> the original messages in any way; you're looking on day 4 to see if
> there are any bounces for the address, and if they are, the address
> fails the test.)

So with Delay(), it doesn't matter how many bounces occurred -- if, in
Bill's original example, more than one bounce (the initial bounce) has
occurred by the end of day 4, the address is eliminated.  Is that correct?

For an announcement (or any type for that matter) mailing list with a fairly
static subscriber base, in order to have LISTSERV handle bounces with
minimal mercy, would I want a shorter Delay setting?  Say one posting is
distributed per week.

In another scenario, say I have Delay(2).  If a subscriber's mail bounces
once every other day, will they ever be deleted?

Thanks,
Kathy Montgomery
University at Albany, NY