Maybe all those ASCII-160 characters, which show as a with acute accent in
extended US-ASCII as used by DOS and OS/2, confused the list server?  Maybe the
list server didn't recognize that those ASCII-160 characters were really
supposed to be spaces (ASCII-32)?

There was a line in the headers

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

but maybe that had no effect?

Message looked like this, verbatim:

it says send back a message with 
auth a3923dec subscribe netbsd-help madhombre@yahoo.com
in the body, that is what I did and this is what I get back!

majordomo@netbsd.org wrote on 11/6/01 1:52:11 PM:
>
>--
>
>>>>> auth a3923dec subscribe netbsd-help madhombre@yahoo.com
>**** Command 'auth a3923dec subscribe netbsd-help madhombre@yahoo.com' not recognized.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> _________________________________________________________
>**** Command '_________________________________________________________' not recognized.
>>>>> Do You Yahoo!?
>**** Command 'do' not recognized.
>>>>> Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
>**** get: unknown list 'your'.
>>>>> 
>**** Help for majordomo@netbsd.org:
>
>
>This help message is being sent to you from the Majordomo mailing list
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