Your Internet Consultant - The FAQs of Life Online
If you want your message to appear in more than one newsgroup (such as comp.sys.mac.wanted and misc.forsale.computers.mac) you can achieve this by crossposting. If you look at the header in the news you will notice the item Newsgroups:. Put the names of the newsgroups in this item separated by commas. Scan the headers of almost any newsgroup, and you are bound to see how it is done.
Example:
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.wanted,misc.forsale.computers.mac,ca.wantedThe number one rule of crossposting is that it should never be done indiscriminately. If you feel that it is necessary to crosspost, consider carefully your selection, and keep crosspostings to a minimum. Avoid crossposting to groups that are branches of the same subhierarchy (such as comp.sys.mac.wanted and comp.sys.mac.misc).
What goes for newsgroup selection in general also applies to crossposting. Never crosspost to newsgroups that do not coincide with your subject.
There is one very important don't in crossposting. Do not send the same message separately to different newsgroups. Always use the crossposting facility of the Usenet (with multiple groups in the Newsgroups: header line). If you repeat a message separately in different newsgroups, readers will have to see your posting many times over, and will get annoyed.
Be careful, however, if you edit the headers. Learn their exact requirements. If you make mistakes, the posting may fail, or the followups to it by other users may fail because of your editing errors. For example
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal,comp.os.msdos.programmer,would result in an error in follow-up because of the trailing comma.
Note: Timo has a great collection of Internet FAQs of
his own, which are available via FTP from garbo.uwasa.fi as
/pc/ts/tsfaqn39.zip