We are living in a world with 8 character userids and 80 character
punch cards. I don't like it but that's reality. I just tried to feed
the Crosswell mailer with PRT mail. No chance (By the way, the rejection
mail sent to the postmaster truncates the lines which is of course not
desirable). Therefore Listserv shares its difficulties with software
which is (or should be) standard for VM nodes. In my opinion it isn't
a good idea to send mail to the 'user@node' address directly if 'node'
has a mailer. As long as this will be done I have *no* chance to implement
a decent name registry to get rid of the stupid 8 char userid restriction
(except when I intercept the RSCS link and filter *all* incoming files).
 
I'm not happy with the restrictions of existing networks, but actually
80 char/line punch files seem to be the standard for Bitnet mail (even
132 chars/line don't cure this, it's just another magic number).
I understand the problems in explaining the different behaviour of local
and network mail to users very well. But because I'm far away from Stanford
and its users and have to explain all this to *my* users (after finding
out what happened) I would prefer if MAILER@STANFORD would send punch mail
(and uses mailers when possible) :-)
 
And of course I would like to see a Listserv release which gets not so
confused by PRT mail.
 
  Thomas