I've come across this before, and I don't know if the mechanism in my case might be the same as in yours. I use a Pine mailer, and it does some magical things that I'm not aware of and that in some instances are "overly smart". (If your mailer acts similarly, then this may be the problem.) Sometimes I'm sent a file which I believe to be composed solely of low-order ascii characters, but in fact there are stray high-order characters or tabs or what-not, but they're no apparent when viewed through the Pine mailer. When I try to PUT such a file to Listserv, Pine detects the high-order characters and before transmission, alters the entire file, specifically by tansforming any instance of "=" to "=3D" (and several other tranformations). Since the PUT cpmmand always requires a PW=XXXXXXXX command, Pine changes this to PW=3DXXXXXXXX and thus when Listserv receives the file, it rejects the PUT because the password *it* sees is indeed incorrect. The solution for me is to make doubly sure that all high-order ascii characters are stripped away from any file I send to Listserv via the Pine mailer. (These error-laden files are often the result of trying to create an ascii file from a word-processor document.) If you have a "smart" mailer like Pine, it might be doing these same things to files -- and only those files -- that contain high-order ascii characters. -- Roger Burns [log in to unmask]