Paul Baclace writes:

...

It seems I perpetrated a vile and offensive error in sending a subscribe request directly to the list.

I don't get offended, I just save the subscribe/unsubscribe message in a special folder that I will use to train a learning algorithm to recognize these kinds of requests. [...] If anyone has suggestions for implementation that maximizes applicability (e.g., I could write a C program that reads stdin or a named file and returns a status code), please let me know.

Since you mention stdin, I assume you're running UNIX. In that case, it's very easy to do this using awk; no C programming required. To try this out, create a small awk program called subscribe.awk, which contains one regular expression per "flavor" of subscribe request. The command in braces is executed if a match for that regexp is found: /[Pp]lease subscribe me/ {exit 1} /[Aa]d me to the/ {exit 1} /How .* subscribe/ {exit 1} [etc.] Create or capture a suitable example message. To test it: % awk -f subscribe.awk subscribe_message; echo $status 1 % awk -f subscribe.awk other_message; echo $status 0 Or, you can use awk as a filter: % cat subscribe_message | awk -f subscribe.awk ; echo $status 1 % cat other_message | awk -f subscribe.awk ; echo $status 0 Now, just wrap it in a shell script which responds with an appropriate message (you can of course have subscribe.awk return a different exit code depending on which regular expression is matched), and call the shell script from your $HOME/.forward file, mail filter, or whatever. -- Martin Janzen janzen@idacom.hp.com