>One of these programs is called "vacation". I know, when I send mail to one of my Unix colleagues I get an automatic answer saying "/usr/staff/(...)/vacation: segmentation fault, core dumped" :-) The purpose of this message is, of course, to inform me that he is away until his VAX runs out of disk space, at which time the angry users will find him wherever he is and he'll have to come back and clean up the mess :-) More seriously: >A member of my list told me that the vacation program will not respond >to mail that has a header with the field Precedence: bulk in it. Look at your average non-BITNET distribution list header, and see if you find a 'Precedence: bulk' there. Chances are that you won't; the program does not create problems for non-BITNET lists because it doesn't answer any message whose header contains '-REQUEST@' (but don't suggest that the program be modified to ignore messages containing '-L@', you'd get burned on a bonfire before you have time to finish your sentence). The program will also not answer any mail which doesn't have the userid of the person running vacation in the 'To:' or 'cc:' field; if you're running 1.6 and the user in question is subscribed with a non-BITNET address (which is extremely likely), he will get mail which does not have his name in the 'To:' field and the program should not answer, except of course that there is an option (by the intuitive name of '-j', "generate as much 'j'unk mail as you can"), telling it to answer anything coming into the user's mailbox; I suppose the user in question made use of this option. Finally, vacation nastygrams are by default not sent more than once a week; if you get an answer for each posting, it probably means the user set the delay to 1 second, telling the program to make sure to answer each and every message in order to compensate for the decrease in traffic due to the messages the user will not be writing during his vacations. And the same user will be more than willing to explain how LISTSERV is violating a huge array of internet standard documents by not putting "Favourite-Ice-Cream: Raspberry" in the headers it generates, thus causing a lot of unwanted traffic. >Is there a way to get LISTSERV to include this field in the header that >it produces when distributing list mail? There is no way to do that, but if you install 16E-003O on your server it will happily throw away the second and following messages from the user in question; in addition, if his program is indeed set up as explained above to answer absolutely everything even if an answer has been sent to the same sender just 10 sec ago, it will start a mail war with LISTSERV which will cause him to be served off, and any further vacation (or non-vacation) message from that user will be discarded. Eric