Users may have trouble changing their subscriptions
(for which you should try to ensure that they
send their initial requests to
listserv@acm.org
and desperate requests to
listname-request@acm.org,
never to
listname@acm.org).
In this category are subscription requests sent to the wrong place;
I recommend telling people how to do it right themselves,
or the listowner will have to do more for them later,
and in the worst case,
people who have trouble subscribing
might be the most likely to send an UNSUBSCRIBE request
to the entire list.
I keep the following standard reply:
All LISTSERV subscription requests should be sent to:
listserv@acm.org
Examples:
subscribe chi-announcements Gary Perlman
set chi-announcements digest
unsubscribe chi-announcements
scan chi-announcements Perlman
Note that you do not supply your email address to LISTSERV.
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But if users are really having problems,
you might need to
manually add/delete subscribers
possibly after
scanning the list for part of a name.
You may have to
deal with bounced mail
but often you can depend on listserv's
automatic deletion.
If you get a message that a user's mailbox
is full, set the NOMAIL option for them.
Use the QUIET option because notification would bounce.
quiet set listname nomail for boxfull@aol.com
If you get a message that there is no such user at a site,
you might consider deleting them from the list.
It is most common to get such messages with student accounts
(e.g.,
stdnt692@harvard.edu)
but sometimes you will recognize an address as someone
who has moved, or the bounce will provide you
with a new address, in which case you might
DELETE the old address and ADD the new.
quiet del listname no-such-user@aol.com
If you get a message that a host does not exist,
keep in mind that it might be a DNS (Domain Name Server)
problem and the site might reappear in a day or two.
If you are sure the site does not exist, you can delete them,
but it is usually best to leave that to LISTSERV's
semi-automatic deletion.
quiet del listname user@no-such-host.com
You may have to deal with inappropriate postings,
such as material that is off topic, or spam.
For subscribers, you can set the NOPOST and NOMAIL
options to stop mail from going in and out,
so to stop a spammer, you can add them to your list
and disable mail between them and the list.
quiet add listname loudmouth@spam.com You May Have Won $100000!
quiet set listname conceal for loudmouth@spam.com
quiet set listname nopost for loudmouth@spam.com
quiet set listname nomail for loudmouth@spam.com
or
quiet set listname conceal,nopost,nomail for loudmouth@spam.com
In some cases, you may want to consider setting
an editor/moderator for the list.
Once an inappropriate posting has been made to an archived list,
you might want to remove the message from the list's archive.
We ran into a problem of a virus being posted in a Word document macro,
and to remove the file from the archive,
here is what I did:
- Find the article number:
SEARCH chi-Jobs virus
- Figure out what file the message is in:
GET chi-Jobs FILELIST
- Get the file:
GET chi-Jobs LOG9707D
- Edit the offending message out from between the delimiters:
===================
- PUT the file back to the listserv:
PUT chi-Jobs LOG9707D pw=password
followed by the edited archive.
If the infected message was 57,
message 57 will now be the next message
(unless you left two
======== lines in a row,
which you might want to do to be able to refer to
specific messages by posting number).
It turned out that the relacing message was SPAM,
so I edited out that message too.
