Re: Finicky servers

[cld@xxxxxxxx (Carl Distefano)]

Reply to note from Patricia M Godfrey  Mon, 20
Oct 2003 09:59:41 -0400

> < RUN THERE
> . . .
> We've been round this mulberry bush a few times before, IIRC.
> Is there a list anywhere of the ListProc's command words, so we
> can try to remember to avoid them in our posts?

I don't think you want to go there, Patricia. In this case the
offending word was RUN, but it might as well have been SUBSCRIBE,
-UNSUBSCRIBE, SET, INFORMATION, INDEX, GET, VIEW, DIGEST,
-RECIPIENTS, STATISTICS, REVIEW, SEARCH, FAX, RELEASE, LIVE, or even
-WHICH, for heaven's sake -- and there are more. The good news is
that the post bounces only when the command word appears at the
beginning of a line (which is why I've inserted hyphens in the
relevant lines above). But the bad news -- and it is really bad --
is that, because only the first three letters of any ListProc
command are significant, ANY line beginning with any of those three-
letter clusters will cause a post to bounce, even if the word they
appear in isn't a command word! Thus, if a line happens to start
with the word "rectify", the post will bounce because ListProc will
have parsed it as "RECipients". The design is wacko. And don't
expect a fix: as you may know, ListProc is no longer developed.

The short answer is that, if your post bounces, don't try to guess
which word is triggering it. Just rejigger the margins so that the
offending word, whatever it happens to be, is no longer at the
beginning of a line.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx
http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/