Oakland Community College Listserv appears to have been down for the last 24 hours or so. At least we can't connect with it. Some of our lists distribute mail through OCC. So the mail that was sent via there hasn't arrived. As far as I can see, Oakland Community College listserv doesn't work fairly often. The mail for the classes I teach goes from H-NET to OCC to Lansing Community College, so I can easily observe that it often drops into the void or is severely delayed at times when both H-NET and Lansing Community College seem to be in good shape. I just added the keyword * Mail-Via= Direct to all the Lansing Community College lists, as they are in Final's Week, and very upset about the missing mail. It worked great. Suddenly the mail is going out again on these little lists (though yesterday's mail is still hanging in the void somewhere). I have some questions though, that I'd appreciate input on, if anyone has time. 1. At times I've heard that * Mail-Via= Direct isn't such a good thing to use. I can find very little about it in the manuals, but they don't seem to approve either. What exactly did I do, and what are the disadvantages? 2. The lists I just changed are very small, so I don't expect that going Direct will change our volume in any way we could notice. But I'd like to know what percent of our mail is now going out via Distribute groupings, and what percent is going out Direct (is there an average percentage for lists overall?). We keep getting hung up by one node or another, especially on Internationally based lists, and I'm wondering about changing to Mail-Via= Direct on a number of lists. What I don't understand is how much more strain that would put on our sendmail (which is already at max on peak days). 3. OCC appears to be really causing us a problem. I'd like to bypass them on all lists, not just my little local ones, because I suspect the many reports we're getting about mail disappearing on other lists may stem from it getting lost there. Is there a way for us to continue to DISTRIBUTE mail, but not use selected problem nodes on the way out? Or better yet, to exclude nodes selectively when they are down, and then put them back in later, when we hear it's fixed? I'm especially interested in directing where the first pass on the DISTRIBUTE goes, as it appears to go directly from here to problem nodes very often, as far as I can tell. I'm sure the OCC folk are great, but they have 6 lists with a total of 133 subscribers, and I sense maybe they don't have quite as much reason as we do to worry when they go down, so I'd rather not distribute our mail through them at all. 4. I don't know if there is a command to use to get the name and phone number of the proper person to call when a listserv is down. Since [log in to unmask] won't respond to us, I can't ask it, but I'd sort of like to talk with those OCC folk about what's going on. Thanks for any insights and help with all this. Vickie Banks H-NET Technical Assistance [log in to unmask]