At 08:02 11/8/96 -0500, Pete Weiss wrote: >One of the "beauties" of questions like "how do I turn off >the NOMAIL option" is that it spawns Q&A as to why and how >list-owners operate lists. We tend to have our own >parochial views based principally on our own experience. Of >course the answer as to WHY sometimes reveals a more >practical method or other controls. Sometimes not. Yes! One of the features of LISTSERV is that it is sufficiently flexible to be used in many ways for many purposes--some of them not even anticipated by Eric Thomas. I've learned a lot on this list than has stretched the boundaries of what I thought was possible. I've been concerned about the responses to the question about disabling the NOMAIL option. Some of the people who answered seemed more interested in telling the person who asked the question that he was foolish to want to do this than they were in helping him. I can think of at least three distinctly different circumstances in which disabling NOMAIL would be appropriate for a list. It would be a lot more useful to answer the question than to quarrel with the need for disabling NOMAIL. Now let me answer the original question. leftI don't know of any way to selectively disable the setting of NOMAIL without disabling the setting of other options. You can disable all changes by locking the list. Then you can unlock the list when you want to make changes. leftAnother approach is to issue a SET listname MAIL FOR *@* command every day. It is not hard on many systems to set up a script that will send a daily message automatically. This does not keep the person from setting NOMAIL, but it insures that the setting will soon be changed back to MAIL. Now that I have answered the question, I can raise the issue about why one would want to do this: leftPerhaps if we knew why you wanted to disable the NOMAIL setting, we could suggest an alternative method of achieving what you want. I find discussions about actual situations much more informative than hypothetical situations. Peace, Dan <<<< Daniel D. Wheeler - Education & Psychology, Univ. of Cincinnati >> <<<< Email: [log in to unmask] URL: http://www.uc.edu/~wheeler/ >>