On Wed, 4 Aug 1993 01:35:07 -0400 Chris Lewis <[log in to unmask]> said: >5) As a stopgap kludge, FAQ writers can diddle the contents of their > articles every time they send it if there are no other changes. But > this is solving the wrong problem. The article is a duplicate. > It is supposed to be. It is a duplicate in the sense that the contents are the same. But it is NOT a computer-induced copy of the same human-induced posting. In usenet terms, it hasn't got the same message ID. You send the FAQ every month, explicitly, for a very good reason: you want it distributed so that new subscribers can pick up useful information and ask less novice questions. It would be incorrect to quietly trash the FAQ on the basis that it was already posted one month ago. You need the kludge for the FAQ because, unlike normal messages, you explicitly acknowledge the fact that the FAQ doesn't change every month but should be redistributed every month anyway, for the benefit of new subscribers or people who wiped out their hard disk or whatever. This could be implemented by adding a header field with 'Post-Anyway: TRUE', but things being as they are there is no guarantee this header won't be swallowed somewhere on the way between you and the mailing list, so it isn't a workable solution. The simplest and safest solution is to time-stamp the body of your FAQ's. This also gives users the opportunity to know when they can expect a new FAQ. For the reasons I mentioned above, the RFC822 'Date:' field is pretty much meaningless - it can have been updated or inserted anywhere along the line. Eric