I think Michael was talking about seeing all the recipients at his node,
not all of the recipients on the list.
 
I presume local recipients from a remote list are grouped together so
one note is passed to MAILER@LOCAL and the note is passed around.  But
if the list is local, there is no savings in network traffic by bunching
the recipients, so LISTSERV seperates them, which is what Mike was
seeing.  This is what we've all seen with local and remote lists; Mike's
just noticing that a remote list being DISTRIBUTEd acts like
REMOTE-L@LOCAL, not REMOTE-L@REMOTE, which is the case when mail-via
is not set to DISTRIBUTE.
 
Nick