listname-request is a very old Internet convention for the standardized mailbox to which one should send all administrative requests. It can be argued whether "subscribe foobar" is an administrative request or a command, but one thing that is clear is that "Hello, my name is Joe Smith and I work at the <....> Thanks in advance!" is definitely a valid administrative request, and deserves a better answer than "Unknown command - HELLO". Unfortunately, a number of list managers alias these mailboxes to the command processor, sometimes with a filter that tries to detect English requests and pass them to the list owner, sometimes without. LISTSERV is used in at least 37 countries, with a corresponding number of natural languages, and many LISTSERV users have mail systems which insert a letterhead-looking header at the top of the mail message, with the person's snail-mail address, phone number, and so on. This means you can't base your filter just on the first line, if you want to support people with Macs or All-in-One or PROFS. On the other hand, a normal letter is not unlikely to contain something that looks like a valid command in the first 20 lines or so. I have already proposed a separate convention such as listname-processor or listname-manager, which would provide a standardized way for users to send commands without having to know the name of the mailing list manager while removing this ambiguity, but of course all I can do is suggest. Eric