This was done for spam prevention of course and it is up to the LISTSERV administrator to decide who is or is not authorized. The feature can even be turned off, but you're probably right in assuming that most people will leave it on and not authorize anyone :-) A typical large academic site will have list owners who are known to the administrator and can be trusted, and then any number of list owners who are completely unknown and may or may not be trustworthy. You can authorize the ones you know, but this is a slippery slope and the simplest solution is to authorize none. For occasional use (as you described), you could use another method, or maybe install a copy of LISTSERV Free Edition on your PC. You can configure it to accept DISTRIBUTE jobs from you, and you then need a willing SMTP host (the only advantage is that you don't need to change the scripts that prepare the job or worry about what the messages will look like). Eric