The SYSOUT transmitter stops transmitting data sets for its current job and issues an RTAM “negative close” to cause the SYSOUT receiver to delete any output it has already received (that is, purge the received job). The transmitter will remove the job output elements (JOEs) it has acquired from the network JOE queue. The data sets represented by the JOEs will not be available for output. If, after removing the JOEs, there is no more work to be performed for the job, the job will be queued for purging.