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Let us say you live in the state of Montana, USA. You are offering a car for sale, and wouldn't be willing to drive it to New York or Finland to a potential buyer. Why, then, would you want your post to be seen by readers in those far away places? It only wastes the New York readers' time and hard disk space. Because of this, if you don't want to deal internationally, or if you don't mind that people in other cities won't see your article, then please take advantage of the article distribution feature built into most newsreaders.
When you write your article, your newsreader will probably prompt you for a "Distribution:". All you need do is enter a few letters to save several megabytes of space worldwide. At that prompt, enter the lowercase code for the region where you want your article transmitted; your system administrator will be able to tell you your local set of codes. Often, a country name or abbreviation like the suffix on your Internet host will work. Also, state names or abbreviations, and city names or abbreviations. But, these abbreviations are often very fickle, so you will need to contact your sysadmin administrator.
Three additional quirks about distributions should be noted. First, the average user, and many advanced users, cannot send to a distribution region outside his own. If you are in Houston, Texas, USA, you cannot limit your distribution to the readers of Dallas, Texas. You will have to send your article to the entire state of Texas. Second, distributions are not an exact science. Many sites will ignore distributions and send your article to another planet anyway. Third, despite the first and second notes, ethical commercial users should consider distributions to be a mandatory tool. Use them whenever it won't hurt your marketing to do so.
Once your item has sold, or your offer has expired, it may be advantageous to cancel, or delete, your article from the newsgroups. If your article is more than 4 days old, then it probably isn't worth your time to try to cancel it unless you made a netiquette blunder in posting it.
Many text-based newsreaders, especially UNIX-based, will allow you to cancel an article by pressing a capital or lowercase "C" when you go back and reread your article. The exact command should be in the on-line help.
Some graphical newsreaders, including the built-in Netscape Navigator newsreader, will also allow you to cancel messages. Almost always, you need to go back and reread your article. Then, select something like "Cancel message" from an "Edit" or "Post" menu while your article is in the article window.
If you can't figure out if you can cancel messages or not, contact your system administrator or news software technical support for help. The "cancel" option may be so buried in menus that it could take awhile to find it. And don't worry if you accidentally try to cancel the wrong message. If you didn't write it, you won't be able to cancel it. That power is reserved for the gurus.
In the case of a netiquette blunder, your system administrator probably has the ability to cancel your message regardless of your posting software. This approach should be taken only if you can't figure out how to cancel it by yourself, and only in the case of a blunder that has resulted in hate mail in your mailbox.
If you are commercial, we can't emphasize enough that you should be able to cancel messages, or have good enough relations with your sysadmin that he will do it for you. If something escapes that you didn't intend, or proved inflammatory, the Internet won't have much sympathy for you if you are blundering for-profit.
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