It turns out that my hateful email software is indeed splitting my line lengths. Thanks for steering me that way -- it's hell to locate where the value is set, so I've been doing my listserv testing from an id on a unix machine that at least has a mailer that preserves my lines as typed. We have some long list names, and management wants to preserve the ability to have list names as long as they like. Well, not with listserv, they can't. Not if you can only create lists with job control files that have 100 as a maximum number of characters. But it's less than 100. Let's count down. PUT [# of characters in listname].LIST PW=[# of characters in password] or 100-(13+length of password) So 86 (or, more reasonably, 80) is the maximum number of characters in a list name. But maybe even that's optimistic. I'm new at this, and I'm not familiar with all the listserv commands that a user, owner, or manager might send. Are there any that use the name of the list in the message body that might bump up against that 100-character limit as well? Thanks again. cheers, Elizabeth Elizabeth Poole [log in to unmask] Collaborative Computing - Watson I/S T.J.Watson Research Center tieline: /862-3045, external: 914-945-3045 PO Box 218, Yorktown Heights NY 10598