Usenet Improvement Project

The Problem -
And The Solution

Home: What Is The Project?
Underlying Issue
Other Voices A G-Grouper Is Born
Participating
Results!
Gmail - A Warning
Filters Other Stuff
Feedback

Participating in the Usenet Improvement Project

With a decent news client, participation is simple; even with a not-so-good client it can be done with a bit more effort. Read on.

But first, please understand that this web site and the Usenet Improvement Project are not just about the matter of improving your own Usenet experience; they are at least as importantly about not encouraging GG's use as a posting source in the first place.

In a manner in keeping with the workings of your proper news client, simply install a rule that is triggered by the appearance of the string googlegroups in the Message-ID (MID) header of articles to kill/bin/twit those articles. If your news client doesn't have adequate filtering capabilities (e.g., Thunderbird) you can accomplish this with a local server like Hamster (Windows) or slrnpull or leafnode (both Linux/Mac). With them you can do your filtering on any headers you wish, and pull newsgroups from there with your client. For background on filtering and filter syntax specific to various news clients (and the local servers mentioned above), see the Filters pages.

If there are any messages from Google Groups that do not place this string in the MID header, it has not come to our attention. If you do see any that somehow avoid this simple rule, please report this via the Usenet newsgroup news.software.readers. That group, by the way, is highly recommended for news client discussion in general.