I am testing

Why don't you use alt.test or misc.test (see below) like normal folks?

Novice users, and sometimes even others, occasionally place these "A test, please ignore" messages in discussion newsgroups. Please don't do this. It is wasteful of the resources. These news reach tens of thousands of readers, so a very wide distribution is involved. Furthermore, many users find the test messages very annoying in the discussion newsgroups, and you have a good chance of getting some testy email.

There is a much better solution for the testing. There are special test newsgroups just for this purpose, such as alt.test and misc.test. The misc.test is a good option, since there are several test echoes along the feed. They will automatically send you email acknowledgements when your test posting reaches these servers.

This can be interesting once or twice, but after that you may want to conduct your testing without these emails. In that case, you can tell news servers to not send you these confirmation emails by including the word "ignore" in the posting's subject line.

this should be in alt.informative.diatribe

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote:

Actually, there was good reason for my doing what I did in spite of your displeasure.

As it is, my test message must have reached this newsgroup because otherwise, you would not have responded. Because it was not in the list of headers I downloaded, that means that I could not read this newsgroup even though I could send to it. Because of your message, I now know the problem was with my news server.

Bill

-- Fermez le Bush