[Jason]

every time i email to my subscribe address that mailman gives me,

Are you referring to the "list creation message" that $prefix/bin/newlist mails to the list's administrator?

it comes back unknown user. what am i missing here???

You haven't made your MTA aware of the new addresses that bin/newmail asks the site admin to define (how you define new addresses is haghly MTA dependant, so I can't explain all of that here).

If you're using sendmail, adding the aliasfile lines bin/newmail to your /etc/aliases file, and then running "newaliases" should _probably_ suffice -- but it really depends on how your sendmail has been set up.

Harald