On the eleventh day of the new year, the listserver said to me: >>> Messages to you from the dragaera mailing list seem to have been bouncing. I've attached a copy of the first bounce message I received. [... Here's part of the quoted bounce message:] Hi. This is the qmail-send program at dd-b.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. <mam at theworld.com>: 199.172.62.248 failed after I sent the message. Remote host said: 555 No, thank you. <<< My ISP has a spamblocking policy that sometimes bounces legitimate messages because the program thinks they look like spam, and this is the message that it returns in such cases. The bounced message may contain a "suspect" subject line or even text, or come from an ISP that seems to be the source of a lot of spam, or contain a link to such an ISP, etc. We the users cannot opt out of this spamblocking, and we get no notification of what is blocked. If I hadn't received this message from the dragaera listserver, I never would have known that a particular message was lost. I don't get these bounce notifications from the dragaera listserver very often, but if for some reason you expected me to respond to a post and I didn't -- well, it's probably because I haven't been keeping up with everything on this list, but it may be because of a bounce. Send it to me directly, and if it bounces to you, send it to my office address, mamandel at ldc.upenn.edu. Please reserve that address for confirmed bounces -- i.e., if you send me email directly and it bounces with "555 No, thank you". Sorry for the interruption. Now back to our regularly scheduled chaos///// amorphia//////// programming/////////// discussion. -- Mark A. Mandel http://world.std.com/~mam/Cracks-and-Shards/ a Steven Brust Dragaera fan website