Info@VM1.NoDak.EDU (Marty Hoag) (06/30/91)
On June 12th at 2 PM CDT we upgraded NoDak's LISTSERV software to a special "beta" test pre-release of release 1.7 known as 1.6g. Several changes we know about are important to you to know about: 1. LISTSERV treats mail from user addresses of "uucp", "postmaster", "root", and "mailer-daemon" as error bounces. Here's a sample error msg: The enclosed mail file, found in the LISTSERV reader and shown under the spoolid 4200 in the console log, has been identified as a possible delivery error notice for the following reason: mail origin seems to be a mailer or mail-daemon. LISTSERV used to only reject "mailer-daemon" mail that way but many systems return error mail to the Sender: address without the original headers and LISTSERV had not way of detecting that. This means that all requests and mail contributions must come from some OTHER address! I think LISTSERV will still distribute mail to these addresses but if the user tries to send something to the list it will probably get rejected. This may cause a bit of extra work for users on very small systems where they may have only root defined or if they have one of these IDs as their ONLY mail address. I think I was the one who asked for this addition and I realize it causes some problems for users whose address may be "root" or "postmaster". I'd like to know if this is a severe problem for anyone. I would think that most users with those addresses could have access to more "normal" addresses too... mgh 2. The LISTSERV author, Eric Thomas, has added some code to check file distributions for corruption. Some sites seem to be appending part of the distribution file to itself and this can cause rather strange output and/or huge numbers of duplicated control commands which are distributed among LISTSERV sites. You probably won't see the error messages but this might help catch some of the strange problems with distribution lists ending up inside of mail (especially to EARN sites). We've already caught a few! But it will be much more effective when more than 2 of the 200+ LISTSERV sites are running the code! ;-) Let me know of any new problems. Thanks! Marty