First, consider the case of a filelist associated with a digest mailing list, with one posting per month. There you do want to get the update when the mail is sent. Also, if the routine is not called, there will be an inconsistency between the actual last-update date of the filelist and that stored in LISTSERV FILELIST. This is of course not desirable. I can't propose any technical solution to this problem, only a "common sense" one: when a new file is made available to the world on this filelist, the person that does so should send a note to the list to inform the world about it, rather than play Vogon captain :-) Eric