On Mon, 19 Jun 1995 08:10:17 -0700 "Kevin J. Sinclair" <[log in to unmask]> said: >What I most want is a banner on the digest version of the lists. Will >TOP_BANNER/BOTTOM_BANNER appear on every mail message, and digest >message? Or can the regular mail and the digestified mail have different >banners? Both appear on all messages in the digest, for different reasons. The top banner is intended to carry copyright statements, legal warnings, and the like. We had customers who simply couldn't have used the software without this capability. In most cases this would be just a one-liner. Lawyers don't want to take chances so this has to appear on every individual message. Otherwise if you extracted one message from the digest in good faith it would not have the copyright, and what if you then resent it, who would be to blame, and what if you're using a mail program that automatically bursts digests, blah blah blah. I don't think this is a big problem since the top banner gets in the way of reading the text you're actually interested in, so you want to keep it short anyway, and if it's just 1-2 lines it is no big deal if it appears on every single message, even if it's not a copyright that you do have to have on every message. The bottom banner is for signoff instructions, any info you care to provide, sponsor acknowledgements, etc. On digests it appears on all messages rather than at the bottom of the digest because the bottom of the digest is normally thrown away by unburst programs. That is, people with a mail interface that automatically bursts digests would never see it (and with MIME this will become the norm, I mean in the long run when we switch to MIME digest format). Actually, what you probably want is a setup where people who read the digest as a single big file don't have the multiple bottom banner, but people who read it with an automatic unburster that trims the "superfluous" information do see it. Unfortunately it's hard for LISTSERV to know which is which. I suspect that in a future version, when MIME digest format is introduced as a user selectable option, we'll have MIME digests carry the banner on the assumption that they'll be split automatically, and we'll remove it from the standard digests. It's a tough decision though because there are people who burst standard digests manually too. Anyway you can add a custom digest header by creating a file called listname.DIGEST-H. You can't add a digest trailing because it's supposed to be discarded and in fact you're not supposed to put anything after the end of the digest. Eric