I think there is a misunderstanding about DISTRIBUTE, its purpose, and its future. It is NOT a mechanism to make other, wealthier/nicer people take care of your deliveries (at least not unless explicitly set up this way, as in the case of a unix server doing the deliveries for a VM system; presumably when this happens the owner of the target machine has agreed to the intended usage). The purpose of DISTRIBUTE is to conserve bandwidth and improve delivery delays by doing the following: 1. Have each organization receive only ONE copy of any bulk delivery message meant for multiple recipients at that organization (usually the recipients are on multiple hosts). This is not "other people's traffic", this is traffic destined to your users. You're going to have to process it anyway; you might as well do so in an efficient manner and minimize the load on your external lines. This is particularly important outside of the US and for smaller organizations that can't afford a T1 at $35k/year or so. 2. Provide a second level of optimization by doing the same thing for "regions" and ensuring that only one copy of the message is ever sent to each region. A region would be a group of computers, typically connected to other regions via an expensive line. A typical example is an academic network outside the US, or a service provider. It is clearly in the interest of such providers to squeeze as much value as possible from their trunk lines and to provide the best possible level of service to their customers. The implementation in LISTSERV-NJE, being based on the BITNET topology, generates too many hops. In practice it's not so bad, but the point is that this is not the target for the LISTSERV-TCP/IP backbone of the future. The target is one DISTRIBUTE server per organization and then one (or a few) server per region, with sub-regions if appropriate. A DISTRIBUTE-only license costs on the order of $500-600/year for unix or VMS, which should hardly be an obstacle to any regional organization. The only reason we're charging for it is that this is about what it costs us to answer questions and help people with problems. We don't want to pipe large amounts of mail through servers for which there is no support agreement. Technically you could use the evaluation copies of LISTSERV for that, and they are free, so in fact you can already get a free DISTRIBUTE server if you positively have no money. Eric