My listserv.log file is filling up with the following messages. What can I do about this?


29 Mar 2001 00:00:00 -> XMRG FROM:<owner-TEST@LISTSERV.EXAMPLE.COM> VERSION=1

29 Mar 2001 00:00:00 500 Command unrecognized: "XMRG FROM:<owner-TEST@LISTSERV.

EXAMPLE.COM> VERSION=1"


The problem is that your outbound mailer does not support LISTSERV mail-merge. LISTSERV mail-merge used to require that LSMTP Classic (discontinued for some years) be used as your outbound mailer because mail-merge employed a proprietary extension to the BSMTP command set that only LSMTP Classic implemented. The error shown above is typical of sites that are using sendmail as the outbound mailer and have  


USE_LSMTP_MAIL_MERGE=1


set in their go.user file.  If this is the case, remove the setting and restart LISTSERV.  However, that is not all you need to do.


When you see these errors you must manually remove from LISTSERV's spool directory the *.mail file(s) that correspond to the errors. The easiest way to find the file(s) in question would be to open a shell session, then cd into the LSVSPOOL directory (usually /home/listserv/spool ) and do


grep -H "XMRG FROM" *.mail


from the shell prompt. Then simply move or delete the offending file (or files) from the spool directory. Note that you might have to stop LISTSERV to make it let go of the file before you can move or delete it.


LISTSERV is configured by default to disallow list owners from sending mail-merge jobs, i.e., via the "Mail-Merge" command button in the web administration interface. If you are running LSMTP Classic on a Windows machine to handle your outbound mail from the unix LISTSERV machine, you can allow list owners to perform mail-merge operations by setting


DIST_OWNER_MAIL_MERGE=1

export DIST_OWNER_MAIL_MERGE


in go.user. Then stop and restart LISTSERV to pick up the change.


It should be noted that LISTSERV has supported mail-merge via a standard SMTP server since version 14.4, by use of the EMBEDDED_MAIL_MERGE site configuration variable.  This feature is enabled by default.