>   In other words, can I post with *assurance* a reply to the original
>   poster that I quoted earlier, that this (only one gateway to/from a
>   newsgroup) is policy *everywhere*?
>
No. Only a high probability. There is no such thing as absolute truth on
the Internet, and even less on Usenet. And don't forget - the Internet
and Usenet (netnews) are two very different things. They may be largely
overlapping sets, but they are not interchangeable terms or identities.

Once things leave the control of the listserv environment for the anarchy
of Netnews, anything can happen for any reason - and frequently does.

>   As for "symptoms" of another gateway being opened from the newsgroup
>   that I'm gating, I should rephrase that too:
>
>   Has anyone ever *experienced* a second gateway being opened?
>   What was it like?

The usual symptom is that people in the newsgroup see one thing and the
mailing list see another, people see answers to questions never asked, etc.
OR, they see it multiple times, mail loops can get ugly - fast. On the news
side, "identical" messages will have different message-ids, and different
paths. (And should have different posting hosts.)

One underlying problem is that, comparitively speaking, Netnews propigation
is very random. Even today (despite UUnet's best efforts), there are still
many dial-up uucp links transferring news randomly between each other.

A news message is "published" - whether or not anyone sees that message;
or if Joe sees it, but Jose, doesn't, is never ever known by the
"publisher." Nothing is ever "returned" or "bounced."

A listserv message, because it is a mail message, contains some degree of
"assured delivery," or notification if it fails. I say some degree simply
because even SMTP is NOT a certified delivery mechanism.

LOCAL mail-to-news and news-to-mail gateways are not infrequent, and are
usually well behaved. IF those newsgroups are kept unique to a single
server, and are not re-distributed to ANYBODY for ANYREASON. Their success
or failure is totally in the hands and expertise of the local news/listserv
Systems Administrators.

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill                          Senior Systems Administrator
Information Services and Computing (ISC)   University of Pennsylvania
Internet: [log in to unmask]             [log in to unmask]
          [log in to unmask]                 http://pobox.upenn.edu/~magill/