Warning: the reply address points to me, not the list. I would like to start beta-testing 1.7d either by the middle of this week (after the Ebone meetings) or 1 week later, depending on resulting workload. Please apply now if you are interested. I need mostly SP5 sites and XA/5.5 sites, since I am running ESA 1.1 myself. The differences are mostly internal changes which to improve robustness, functionality and performance while decreasing dependence on CMS functions such as the various reader file manipulation commands, XEDIT sort, and so on. The REXX internals were mostly approximative implementations of the syntax they described - for instance, the QUIET: keyword seldom worked as expected when the syntax was not a straight list of userid@node's, trailing .BITNET's were not consistently removed, and so on. REXX code seldom displayed error messages when system commands gave an unexpected return code, and these messages were usually not very easy to understand anyway. Things are better under 1.7d, but there are still 25k lines of REXX and thousands of potential errors that come from CMS and for which one cannot obtain a meaningful description. The main performance improvements are for LIST GLOBAL, REVIEW, processing of incoming Netdata/DISK DUMP files, generation of BITEARN NODES and PEERS NAMES-based tables, maintenance of large lists, and when mailing files to Internet users (in particular LSVMAIL should not run out of storage any longer - not that any recent change had made LSVMAIL require more storage, but for some reason many people think it is preposterous of me to suggest adding 1M of storage when moving from CMS5/1.7a to CMS8/1.7c and that the reason I make LISTSERV issue warnings at startup when it thinks it hasn't got enough storage is so I can be notified when people reboot their servers). LISTSERV will need more storage when doing nothing due to the fact that REXX code which is not in use sits on disk while PASCAL routines are always in memory, if you are not prepared to add 200k if LISTSERV complains it hasn't got enough, stay with 1.7c. On the other hand, many things that required lots of memory now use up much less, due to not having to load things into stems, edit them, then stack the result and call a routine which will pull the stuff back to another stem and finally stack it again for some other command. The main functionality improvements are new REVIEW options to sort the subscribers' list, better error reporting, automatic conversion of DISTRIBUTE jobs in Netdata or other recognized format before delivery to mail-only recipients, support of ':oldnode.'/':newnode.' tags, automatic recognition of local Internet address if listed in BITEARN NODES but not in configuration file (this seems trivial but can avoid many mailing loops), 'Reply-To:' field pointing to list owners on most list management messages sent to end users, QUERY * for list owners, and many small improvements to the SHOW command. The main incompatibilities were already posted to this list as the code was being written. There is a last one I didn't mention yet - LSVBESTP is gone completely. If you have local programs which called LSVBESTP with 4 or more parameters, you will have problems (the 4th parameter was blindly INTERPRETed, which the new PASCAL code cannot quite do). If you only call it with 2 or 3 parameters, you will be able to use LSVBSP with the same calling sequence. The name was changed to make sure all attempts to call the old routine are caught. Eric