On Mon, 26 May 1997, Alexander Koch wrote: > Quoting [EMAIL PROTECTED] ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > > > Hi. This is the qmail-send program at debian.novare.net. > > I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses. > > This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out. > > > > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > Your message was addressed incorrectly. Here is a list of all of the > > valid addresses in the lists.debian.org domain: > > > debian-admintool-REQUEST: request server for mailing list. > > WHY THE FSCK DO I HAVE TO WRITE REQUEST IN capital LETTERS? > > This is rather unusual. really unusual. > > I was doing it the way it should be and it got bounced. > Please, Peter (?), simply add an alias from -request to -REQUEST or fell > guilty or whatever, IMO this is bad list policy.
As Ray Dassen pointed out, the mailing list that you had attempted to subscribe to is debian-admintool, not debian-admintools. In comment to your statements about capital letters, I reprint information found in the Internet Engineering Task Force's RFC 822, "Standard for ARPA Internet Text Messages", section 3.4.7: 3.4.7. CASE INDEPENDENCE Except as noted, alphabetic strings may be represented in any combination of upper and lower case. The only syntactic units which requires preservation of case information are: - text - qtext - dtext - ctext - quoted-pair - local-part, except "Postmaster" When matching any other syntactic unit, case is to be ignored. For example, the field-names "From", "FROM", "from", and even "FroM" are semantically equal and should all be treated ident- ically. When generating these units, any mix of upper and lower case alphabetic characters may be used. The case shown in this specification is suggested for message-creating processes. The message which you received as an autoreply is merely a script, written to clearly delineate the difference between the mailing list and the administrative address for that mailing list. A fair number of messages regularly come through on the incorrect address. Smartlist can catch some of them and point them in the right direction, but not all. For the curious, here's the script: #! /bin/sh PATH="/bin:/usr/bin" cat << EOF Your message was addressed incorrectly. Here is a list of all of the valid addresses in the lists.debian.org domain: listmaster: A human being, not a machine, your last resort. EOF cd /var/list for i in */dist; do name=${i%%/dist} echo " "$name": Mailing list." echo " "$name"-REQUEST: request server for mailing list." done exit 100 Pete -- Pete Templin, Debian List Administrator [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .