I took the step of adding a gateway to a list I own a few months ago. There are about a thousand subscribers, and probably 2-10 messages/day. Based on the ratio of messages submitted from news readers vs. e-mail subscribers, it's been estimated that there are about 3,000 news readers now. The traffic on the list did go up a moderate amount, and some e-mail subscribers complained and dropped their subscriptions because of the increased volume of mail and the increased breadth of topics that have been discussed. But in general I think it was a positive move. David Inouye, [log in to unmask] ECOLOG-L list owner