Confirm-Delay=

Confirm-Delay= number

This keyword is not available in LISTSERV Lite.

This parameter is an integer representing the number of hours LISTSERV will hold subscription jobs requiring confirmation before flushing them from its queue. For instance, if Subscription= Open,Confirm and Confirm-Delay= 72, LISTSERV will accept a subscription request pending confirmation, send the "cookie" command confirmation request, and will wait 3 days (72 hours) for that confirmation to be received. If the period expires before the "cookie" is received, the subscription request is deleted and the subscriber must resubmit his or her request. The default setting is 48 hours (2 days).

Many unreliable gateways have a turnaround time of several days, and this is another way to filter them: if the confirmation delay is long enough, they will never manage to subscribe and you will not have to put up with gateways that take a week to realize that the subscriber's account has expired and return a week's worth of delivery errors. On the other hand, if you do want to let these people in, you will have to increase the confirmation delay to a week or so (1 week=168 hours).

This keyword can also extend the period of time during which postings to a list coded "Send= Editor,Hold" are held before they are flushed. The default (and minimum) for holding such postings is 7 days (168 hours). Note that you can only increase this period with "Confirm-Delay=", not decrease it. Thus for a list with "Send= Editor,Hold" and "Confirm-Delay=48", the holding period would still be 7 days. But for a list coded "Send= Editor,Hold" and "Confirm-Delay=240", the holding period would be 10 days (240 hours).

Please inform the LISTSERV maintainer before any significant increase to the value of "Confirm-Delay=", particularly if your list is coded "Send= Editor,Hold" or "Send= Editor,Hold,Confirm", as the increased delay could cause a problem with disk space availability.

Note that if you increase "Confirm-Delay=" to extend the holding period for postings, you also are increasing the period during which LISTSERV will hold subscription jobs requiring confirmation.