Subject: Re: listserv capabilities

From: "Alan J. Flavell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 16:53:12 GMT

On 7 Jul 1996 [email-masked] wrote:

> Forgive me for my ignorance but is it at all possible to
> configure pine to act like a listserver?

I think you've misunderstood what PINE is.  When the user executes it, 
it retrieves mail from a mail server, and displays that mail to the user,
and allows the user to save it into folders, forward it, reply to it etc. 
When the user is not executing it, it's incapable of doing anything. 

>  For instance,
> I am familiar with majordomo for macintosh.  Someone sends
> mail to the listserver 

But nobody does send mail to PINE.  They address mail to a user at a mail
domain, and the mail transfer agents pass it to a destination mail server.
Then a user executes a mail client application such as PINE, and PINE
retrieves mail from the mail server, and presents it to the user. 

Why would you suppose the people went to the trouble of writing
listservers or majordomo, if PINE could do this? 

If you want to forward mail in your absence (vacation facility) or have
mail to a given address exploded into a distribution list, then you'd want
to use a facility associated with the mail server, that is active all the
time.  PINE (the client program that you execute intermittently) plays no 
part in that. 

> If this cannot work, does anyone have any other suggestions?  

As far as I can see, we don't know enough about your circumstances to be
able to give specific advice.  Contact the user support or sysadmin of the
mail server that you use. 

Note that managing a mailing list is a nontrivial activity.  It's
far too easy for simple-minded mail exploders to field non-delivery
reports and redistribute those to the list, provoking further
non-delivery reports and redistributing those, leading to server
meltdown and considerable user frustration.  Don't try the d-i-y
approach.

> Please respond to me at [email-masked].

This is usenet.  If you're sufficiently interested in the answer
you'll read the group.  If you aren't sufficiently interested, there
may be other readers who'd like to know the answer anyway.  On the
usenet group news.announce.newusers you will find some helpful notes
on how to work together with the usenet community, you'll get better
results that way.  Good luck.

best regards

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: 7 Jul 1996 15:14:29 GMT

Forgive me for my ignorance but is it at all possible to
configure pine to act like a listserver?  For instance,
I am familiar with majordomo for macintosh.  Someone sends
mail to the listserver and then mail is distributed to everyone
on the list.  This is basically what I'm after.  I am using pine 
in the unix shell of my ISP.

Please respond to me at [email-masked].  Thank you in advance.

Sincerely,
Robert Snell