12.1 I DIDN'T SEE THAT POST THAT EVERYONE IS REPLYING TO.

This is an inherant problem with Usenet - sometimes whole bunches of messages just disappear into that great inbox in the sky, only to appear weeks, even months later when everyone has forgotten about them. Sometimes they also expire before you can get to download them. Such is the vagrancies of Newsgroup addiction. If you are clearly missing a lot of the articles and download every few days, then complain to your ISP, or even switch to a better ISP. One or two missing articles are "just life", a significant number indicates a flakey news service.

12.1.1 Finding "Lost" messages

There are things you can do to find lost messages. You can hope it turns up, watch for someone re-quoting all of it, you can e-mail the author asking them to send it to you, you can ask someone else on the NG to send you a copy, or you can do a search at http://www.google.com for the message.

google (previously known as Deja) more or less archives all text messages of Usenet. Sometimes it misses one or two, its often not working properly, and it can be damn annoying to use, but it does, on the whole, work. There are other groups who also do this, like www.remarq.com, but Google is the only one I know that lets you have free access.

12.2 BUT I DON'T WANT TO BE ARCHIVED

Fair enough, Put

X-No-Archive:Yes

as the first line of your message, and it shouldn't be archived. However, if someone goes and quotes your whole message, that message will be archived, which will include all of yours. It does decrease a little on the spam though.

12.3 IT SAYS THEIR E-MAIL ADDRESS IS INVALID

They've probably munged their e-mail address to stop spam. There are programs out there that "mine" usenet for all e-mail addresses and then sell the addresses to spammers. Most munged addresses will be obviously changed so that humans can easily work out the real e-mail address. Once you have figured out their real e-mail address, you can send them e-mail.

12.4 HOW DO I STOP THIS SPAM?

It is, unfortuantely, part of cyber-life. Try out a killfile if it stops you downloading the offending e-mail. Never ever reply to a spam that says you can be removed from the list if you reply to certain address or go to a particular web site. Although the odd one in a million may be genuine, this is most likely a way for the spammer to make sure your e-mail address is genuine one.

Its hard to stop all spam, but you can take steps to slow it down. First of all, get yourself a throw-away e-mail account from somewhere that gives free e-mail (like Hotmail, Yahoo, Excite etc). Use this as your "reply to" address when posting to Usenet rather than you real home e-mail address, but mung it first with something obvious that any human would recognise as being a spamtrap. When you post, always use X-no-archive:yes as your first line. This should cut down significantly on the amount of spam you are likely to receive from your presence on Usenet. Once you think you are getting too much spam in you throw-away account, change e-mail addresses to another throw away account.

I would also recommend the use of SpamCop (http://spamcop.net) When you do get an unwelcome and unsolicited e-mail that is clearly not a personal message to you, tell Spamcop. They will go through all the headers of the spam and complain to the correct ISP. Unless you know how to read all the headers and interpret which ones are real, and which ones are fake, I'd recommend the use of SpamCop.

12.5 HOW DO I KILLFILE?

There comes a time when you just don't want to see any more messages about "X" or read anything more that has been written by "Y". Most of us have "mental" killfiles in that if we see a message that has certain words in it ("declaw" being the major one), we just don't bother to read it. However, it sometimes gets to the point when you specifically never ever ever want to here from "Person Y" ever again, or that the thread "how to kill cats" is not something you ever want to see on you machine. Killfiles will do the sordid job of removing said offending material from your sight without you having to do it every time one of these offensive posts ever comes up.

Please visit Seanette Blaylock's page that gives comprehensive Killfile instructions for many of the most popular newsreaders: http://www.impulse.net/~thebob/seanette/bitbucket.html