Are academic listservs still active?

The ones I'm on are still active. I'm not in history, though, so none of mine are ones you presumably want. But listservs haven't become extinct, not by a long shot. That said, it's possible that if you have an old list of lists, some of the lists on your list no longer exist.

Do you have a signature file set for your email? That will cause an error message to be generated even though any command that comes *before* the signature will go through. But your command(s) have to be *the first things* in the body of the email, or there will be an error and the software will stop reading what you sent.

If it's actually a listserv list -- let's say it's called history-l -- you will want to send a pair of commands like:

subscribe history-l Jonathan Jones

end

That will ensure that anything that comes after the commands in your email is ignored and won't trigger an error message.

Make sure you're sending your subscription request to the actual software; if the list address is history-l@listserv.random.edu then the address to join the list will probably be listserv@listserv.random.edu

I hope that helps a bit and that you get a better answer from someone who knows what's up with the history list. Good luck.