My thanks to Paul Karagianis, Christopher Barbot and all those who
guided me back to a working list.

For reference this is how I did it.

1) I had to find out why even though my email address was listed in the
listserv config file (via site.exe) It was rejecting my commands.

Valdis Kletnieks put me on the right track with this suggestion:

> Try sending a 'release' command *from the address you think is postmaster*,
> and see if *the address listserv sends the reply to* is listed in the output.
>
> We've had *LOTS* of problems with list owners and subscribers who are
> listed as [log in to unmask], but their mail actually shows up as
> [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask] - which of course
> doesn't match as far as Listserv is concerned....
>
> Occasionally, we get bit by the fact that Listserv tends to key off the
> Sender: header instead of From: - so if the From: contains the correct
> Postmaster address, but Sender: is something else, it won't work....

It turned out that an alias of my email address was being reported as my
address in the email header, so I adjusted that on listserv and commands
would work.

2) the list was cactus and i needed to repair it.

Paul Karagianis helped me with this bit

> Take the invalid file, via FTP or cut and paste or whatever, off
> the system.

So I stopped the listserv service via a 'net stop listserv' and moved
the mylist.list file to another location. I then fired the service back
up again.

> Now split off the subscribers portion after the astericked
> keywords section and put them aside.  Add a line at the top:
>
> put the-lists-name.list pw= your-password

I used this method to build the header for the recreated list, but I
found that it complained about a corruption.

I renamed the mylist.digest, mylist.dbindex & mylist.dbnames with a .old
suffix thinking that there may be a conflict of records there between
old & new, and prepared a new header with out the *LSV-F*   d* that
appeared at the top of the header.

A new list was generated with the previous list's name.

3) Repopulate the list with the previous addresses

Again Paul Karagianis helped.

> and mail it to listserv.  Once you have a functional header back in place
> you can either add the users one at a time or, if there's a lot, use a
> bulk add.  The the subscribers that you put aside, delete the control bits
> off the end of each line and either edit them up as individual subscribe
> commands or, MUCH better, send the following job:
>
>
> QUIET ADD listname DD=X IMPORT PW= ????????
> //X DD *
> user1@host
> user2@host
> (and so forth)
> /*
>
> If you have "real names" you can add them on after the userid, e.g.,
>
> user1@host His Name
>
> Otherwise LISTSERV adds them with a name field of "(No Name)" unless
> they're already subscribed to another list on your server (in which
> case it uses the value in the SIGNUP.FILEs).

I used both the single add command and also the batch suggestion which
worked fine when I included the list password, but curiously didn't work
if I included my postmaster password. What ever happened to the notion
of root (postmaster)?

OK, so now I understand that the .list files are not unix like text only
config files but contain binary data. Shame I had to learn the hard way.

Now I need to remove the list owner of 5 other lists and replace the
outdated owner.

Get/Put are the tools to use here - right?

Thanks again to all.

Cheers,
Marco
--

           Marco Ostini                   Senior IT Officer
  ,-_|\
 /     +   Phone: 61 7 3365 1524  ----->  Political Science & I.S.
 \_,-._/   Phone: 61 7 3365 3468  ----->  Social Science
      o                                   The University of Queensland
           mailto:[log in to unmask]      QLD   4072   AUSTRALIA