cat - ATTENTION NEWSGROUP ADMINISTRATOR

CyberCat wrote:
ATTENTION NEWSGROUP ADMINISTRATOR

On Wednesday, August 27, 2003 I placed a message on your
"rec.pets.cats.community" Newsgroup entitled "I'm Terminally ILL: MIssy
& Rascal Need a Loving Home"

When I placed that message I foolishly used my real E-Mail address
without 'cloaking' it with a dummy insert to protect it from SPAM-hunter
robots. I am now being besieged with a torrent of malicious SPAM E-mail
as a result.

Please remove all of my NewsGroup messages and I will re-submit them
with the proper dummy inserts.

Thank you.

Unfortunately there is no "newsgroup administrator" on Usenet newsgroups
- or should I say, there are many thousands of them. Once your message
has left your computer and been accepted by the news server you connect
to, it's almost immediately resent to thousands of other news servers
around the world. And once news readers have downloaded your message,
it's on their machine until they choose to delete it.

I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but once your message has appeared
on some news servers, it's pretty much too late to undo. If you almost
immediately generate a "Cancel" message using your newsgroup software,
you can prevent a fair amount of the message spread. But once more than
just a few minutes have passed, even a "Cancel" message will be of
little use.

Dan