[donnacha]

Originally Posted by oldengine

Question: on a particular newsgroup, are message numbers the same on ALL providers? In other words, without changing the "last message number" The board should pick up again where it left off?

No, numbering depends on the retention of each service: the first first (free but no-posting) service I used had 10,000+ posts for a particular newsgroup whereas the second (paid and posting-allowed) only had 1,000+.

I cheated by changing the "start from" number to 1000, probably causing some overlap but the aim, successfully achieved, was to keep the 10,000 posts but continue to add new posts via the paid, posting-allowed service.