Re: **Important message from Group owner and Moderator**

On 18/01/08 21:53, John Holmes wrote:
Peter Moylan wrote:
This newsgroup has neither a group owner nor a moderator.

For your presumption, you can soon expect a visit from The
Committee.

Peter, where did you find the post that you are replying to? It
didn't appear on my server, and your post has no "References:"
header.

From my header:
References:
<7ec06a3d-14d9-4354-af81-60b0ce609619@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Perhaps your news server stripped that out because it had no copy of
that message - although in that case it's supposed to assume that the
original will turn up later, which does sometimes happen legitimately -
or because it has records showing that the message was cancelled. I
assume that Google Groups has a copy, since that's where the spam
originated, but I don't have the patience to check.

The reason it didn't appear on your server is almost certainly that a
spambot cancelled it. Spambots are the antibiotics of the Usenet world.
They chase spam, and issue "cancel" messages for it. To avoid
accusations of bias, they use a very restricted definition of spam:
something like "an identical message appearing on more than N
newsgroups". Whether the message does get cancelled depends on the
server. It's a race, with the cancellation chasing the original, so that
often the result is that the spam appears only in a restrictive part of
the world.

As a general rule, you shouldn't be able to cancel any messages except
your own. Some servers go even further and ignore all cancellations. For
the most part, though, the spambots are trusted because they're known to
be doing a good job.

I once saw an estimate that said that about 25% of all Usenet traffic
was spam, and another 25% was cancellation messages from spambots. The
fact that we get so little spam on AUE is a sign of how effective the
spambots are. Or were; some spammers now know how to defeat them.

--
Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org
For an e-mail address, see my web page.
.

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