As many of you found out yesterday, the LISTSERV is busy sending out its renewal notices to weed out unused accounts. I didn't realize, in my original posting, that the Reply-To address would be set to an address that bounced directly to me. Thus replying to the renewal letter WILL NOT WORK (and I'll get swamped with email).
To renew your subscription to our mailing list when the LISTSERV asks you to, send email to:
LISTSERV@RICEVM1.RICE.EDU
with this line in the body of the mailfile:
CONFIRM TIDBITS
One other note. Several people have sent the CONFIRM TIDBITS mailfile correctly, only to discover that the LISTSERV claims they aren't on the list. I see two possibilities here. The most likely is that your email address appears differently in your header information than it does in the LISTSERV's list - thus the two don't match and the LISTSERV thinks you aren't who you say. In this instance, I recommend letting the old subscription lapse and subscribe again from your current account. Send
SUBSCRIBE TIDBITS your full name
to the same LISTSERV address listed above. The second possibility is that you receive TidBITS from a local distribution list, and we haven't configured that list in such a way that it doesn't need to renew. If you're the list administrator, send me email and I'll fix that for local distribution lists. I've already asked the estimable Mark Williamson at Rice (he's the LISTSERV guru there) to fix the local mailing lists that were in this last batch.