You will see people falsely claiming that they're killing Google Groups postings when they're actually filtering on the appearance of the word gmail in the articles' From headers. They're not. Don't let them confuse you.
While many Google Groups posters do show gmail addresses, so do very, very many non-GG posters. Gmail is a very popular place to maintain email accounts. Filtering on that criterion is not GG filtering; it's gmail filtering. And not all Google Groups articles fly gmail addresses. Don't let them confuse you.
Why does this matter? The last time I did a count in a heavily-spammed newsgroup, only about perhaps 70% of the Google Groups posts showed gmail addresses. So real Google Groups filters were killing about half again as many (100%) of the Google Groups posts as the misguided gmail filters.
But, worse...
So the folks filtering on gmail see more GG spam than if they were filtering correctly. Isn't that their problem? If you only look at the small picture (their view), yes. But please look at the larger picture: by saying that they're killing Google Groups posts by filtering on gmail they are misleading others with a false claim. This web site is about actually filtering Google Groups posters, not about filtering on something else that some Google Groups posters also use and that many non-Google-Groupers use as well. If you're going deer hunting, don't shoot Farmer Brown's pig just because it has four legs (and, more importantly for the bigger picture, don't encourage others to shoot all the pigs they see, too, just because you are unclear on the concept "deer").
Why would they make this false claim and encourage you to follow in their misguided footsteps? Here are some answers. They don't understand - and generally don't seem to want to understand - the difference, as clear as it is. They don't want to bother actually filtering on Google Groups because their news client is inadequate to do that (for example, Outlook Express, Agent, Thunderbird) and requires the use of another small program to do the filtering for it. Oh – and did I mention "they don't understand"?
So, again: don't let them confuse you. Smart shoppers won't buy what they're selling.
Great site Blinky. Keep up the good work. I just killed 54 Google posts. The slaughter continues unabated. – James E. Morrow
I didn't think anyone could top the annual autumn spewage when college classes resumed--then along came the AOL/WebTV crowd. They're now morphing into GoogleGropers, like some biblical sequence of plagues. – Harold Stevens
I've finally had to join the Usenet Improvement Project, it took me a very long time to do so but I finally became convinced yesterday. I've been analyzing posts from GG and have to agree the percent that contain useful info is way too small to worry about. – XS11E
From my own informal sampling, the trash from Google _far_ outweighs the treasure and I'll gladly accept a few losses. – John McGaw
An ungodly large number of numbskulls use google groups and think they're posting to "Google Groups" when they're posting to USENET. – Magus
I finally gave up and I'm blocking google groups posters. Ever since I dropped Google Groups, the world has become a better place. – Evan Platt
