Section 1 Who Should Read This Book?

This manual makes the following assumptions:

• You are a system administrator of a VM, VMS, unix (including MacOS), Windows 2000/XP/2003 or system (or in any case, a person with root- or system-level administrative privileges) whose assignment it is to be the LISTSERV maintainer;

• You have already installed the current version of L-Soft’s LISTSERV on your system in accordance with the installation instructions that come with the package, and have it running;

• You have sufficient knowledge (or know where to find it) of your system mailer to fine-tune it without needing instructions from this manual.

In other words, we expect you already to be knowledgeable about the system on which you plan to install and run LISTSERV. This manual does not contain installation instructions; individual installation guides for the four general types of operating systems supported by L-Soft can be found at http://www.lsoft.com/resources/manuals.asp.

L-Soft international’s LISTSERV software is designed to run on various platforms that have widely-differing configurations. Therefore it is not within the scope of this manual to describe in detail (for instance) how you can tune Sendmail 8.12.3 under Linux for optimum performance with LISTSERV. However, general tips that could work on all systems will be offered within these pages.

Overall you will find that LISTSERV works much the same way on a unix workstation or a VMS minicomputer or an Intel Pentium machine running Windows 2000 as it has since 1986 on VM mainframes. Where LISTSERV procedures do differ between platforms, we will detail those differences in order to minimize confusion.

1.1 Where to Find Changes and Updates to the Manual?

When we find a mistake in the manual, or when between-release features are added, we normally report changes to the manual to the announce-only mailing list LISTSERV-DEVELOPERS@PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM, provided as a free service for our customers.