Living at an Earn site, therefore representing a minor form of life, I'd like to ask somebody at the bright side of this network to support the following suggestion (half a :-) here) Furthermore being a rebel running the Bitnet version of Listserv I'd nevertheless like to ask Turgut to consider this suggestion (the other half of a :-) comes here) An increasing number of sites is using some flavor of the Netnews system under VM, VMS, and Unix to read Listserv mailing lists. Thanks to Eric who supported this Listserv-list-to-Netnews-groups gatewaying by adding the Newsgroups definition, and more important by creating a message-id if necessary. I think this support is worth mentioning as the origins of Netnews are Unix based, and Eric is a Unix hater (or at least was at that time). Now the message-id will only be preserved for FULLHDR subscriptions. Even if you know about this, the situation is sometimes somewhat tricky. If a gateway subscribes to a non-peered redistribution list that is subscribed with SHORTHDR to the main list, the original message-id is lost. Usenet is based on redundant feeds, most of the suppression of duplicates is done based on message-ids. There may be more systems out in netland taking advantage of message-ids, but I'm not familiar with them, and don't know if it's a nice extra or a must. In a perfect world each gateway is subscribed to the right list using the right options. Now look around, do you see a perfect world? (If your answer is yes, please contact me offline) You guessed it, my suggestion is to preserve the Message-id for all forms of header options. Disadvantage: - One more header line for most subscribers. Advantages: - Avoid risks for unexperienced (with respect to Listserv internals) gateway maintainers. - Maybe an overall traffic reduction (I'm not 100% sure here, and too lazy to check it out). Some subscribers (and probably an increasing number of subscribers) are setting FULLHDR just to get the message-id. This causes two distribute jobs where one would be sufficient if the message-id is preserved in SHORTHDR mailings. Thanx for listening to my babbling, Thomas