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- From: tskirvin@killfile.org (Tim Skirvin)
- Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.bulletins,news.admin.net-abuse.usenet,news.admin.net-abuse.sightings,news.admin.net-abuse.misc,news.answers
- Subject: Cancel Messages: Frequently Asked Questions, Part 1/4 (v1.75)
- Supersedes: <cancelfaq20030915050002$27c5@news.killfile.org>
- Followup-To: news.admin.net-abuse.usenet
- Date: Sat, 15 May 2004 00:00:02 -0500
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- Summary: This is a list of Frequently Asked Question about cancel messages
- on Usenet. It mainly discusses how cancels work, who issues
- them, their history, and what to do about them. It is more of
- a general purpose FAQ than anything else; it's not required
- reading anywhere, just more of a reference.
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-
- Archive-name: usenet/cancel-faq/part1
- Posting-Frequency: monthly
- Last-modified: 1999/09/30
- Version: 1.75
- URL: <URL:http://www.killfile.org/faqs/cancel.html>
-
- Cancel Messages
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Part 1/4
-
- This document contains information about cancel messages on Usenet, such
- as who is allowed to use them, how they operate, what to do if your
- message is cancelled, and the like. It does not contain detailed
- instructions on how to cancel a third party's posts. It is not intended
- to be a fully technical document; its audience is the average Usenet user,
- up to a mid-level administrator.
-
- This document is not meant to be a comprehensive explanation of Usenet
- protocols, or of Usenet itself, but a basic knowledge of these concepts
- is assumed. Please refer to news.announce.newusers, RFC1036, and/or
- RFC1036bis if you wish to learn them.
-
- Disclaimers: The information contained within is potentially hazardous;
- applying it without the permission of your news administrator may cause
- the revocation of your account, civil action against you, and even the
- possibility of criminal lawsuits. The author of this document is in no
- way liable for misuse of the information contained within, nor is he in
- any way responsible for damages related to the use or accuracy of the
- information. Proceed at your own risk.
-
-
- Table of Contents > = In other parts of the FAQ
- ================= * = Changed since last update
- I. What are cancel messages?
- A. What are cancel messages?
- * B. Are cancel messages the only way to delete a message?
- C. Where can I find cancel messages?
- D. Who is generally allowed to issue cancels?
- * E. When and why are cancel messages allowed?
- F. How are they issued?
- G. How do I cancel my own post?
- * H. Who decided on these rules?
- II. How do cancels work?
- A. What is control? control.cancel? How do I receive them?
- B. What standards are there for cancelling posts?
- C. What is the format of a cancel message?
- D. Do all news sites accept all forms of cancels?
- E. How do I alias out a pseudosite?
- III. So your post was cancelled...
- A. Why was my post cancelled?
- B. I have the cancel message right in front of me. Why was it cancelled?
- C. But I wasn't doing anything wrong! Why was it cancelled?
- D. Look, pal, I said I wasn't doing anything wrong, and I meant it. I
- didn't break any rules that I can see. *Why was my post cancelled?*
- E. *sigh* Then what do I do about it?
- >IV. What does it take to cancel messages?
- >V. That idiot forge-cancelled my posts!
- >VI. What moral issues are involved with cancel messages?
- >VII. What's going to happen to cancels in the future?
- >VIII. What about these other things?
- >IX. What are the current cancel issues?
-
- >Changes
- >To Do
- >Contributors
- >Pointers
-
- >Appendix A: Dave the Resurrector
- >Appendix B: Retromoderation
-
-
- I. What are cancel messages?
- ============================
- A. What are cancel messages?
-
- Cancel messages are a specialized form of message to Usenet
- that, when they arrive at a server, request that the post bearing the
- Message-ID contained within be deleted. In essence, a cancel message,
- if heeded, cancels another post. Hence the name.
-
-
- B. Are cancel messages the only way to delete a message?
-
- No. Usenet is transitory; not every message will be on all news
- servers at all times. In fact, cancels are fairly rare; the cause of a
- missing message is very rarely a cancel.
-
- First of all, it takes some period of time for a message to
- propagate to all news servers that wish to carry the message. This is
- inherent in the Usenet system; messages take time to arrive. In some
- cases, they do not arrive at all.
-
- More commonly, messages are deleted after a certain period of time
- so that more messages can take their place - this process is known as
- expiration. The amount of time that a post exists varies from server to
- server, and is usually based on the size and content-type of the article
- and the newsgroups to which it was posted; servers typically save posts
- for anywhere from a day to several weeks. As this happens on all news
- servers and is not consistent, expiration is the number one cause of
- "missing" messages.
-
- As time goes on, the software itself has begun to change. Messages
- posted in HTML, messages containing picture attachments, anything posted
- more than a few times, even messages with more than about five newsgroups
- in their headers, all of these are subject to automatic filtering by newer
- news software; ask your news administrators for details about what is done
- at your site.
-
- Finally, there are more specific causes for missing messages.
- Your message may have been replaced by another post using a Supersedes:
- header; your news administrators may be running NoCeM, which selectively
- deletes posts when used on a server level; your message could have been
- filtered before it was even posted. Ask your administrators for more
- information about your system's policies, expiration times, and so forth.
-
- In summary: if your post is missing, do not instantly assume that
- your message was cancelled. A good rule of thumb is "no cancel message,
- no cancel". If you can find the cancel, then your post was cancelled; if
- you can't, it probably wasn't.
-
-
- C. Where can I find cancel messages?
-
- As you must have a cancel message to show that your message was
- cancelled, it is a good idea to know where to look for them. The best
- answer, in the short term, is to search control for the cancel (see
- section II.A. for details). If you are unable to find them there, the
- Usenet search engines may be able to help - using Dejanews (<URL:http://
- www.dejanews.com>) or AltaVista (<URL:http://www.altavista.com>), search
- for your email address and the string 'cancel', and you may be able to
- find any cancels issued for your posts.
-
- It should be noted that, for various reasons, the above methods
- of finding cancel messages are becoming increasingly ineffective. Any
- suggestions or technical help in solving this problem would be greatly
- appreciated by the Usenet community.
-
-
- D. Who is generally allowed to issue cancels?
-
- In general terms, the only people that are always authorized to
- issue cancels for a message are the original author of the message and
- the postmaster at the site the message was posted from. However, there
- are rules that allow third-party cancels in specific circumstances, such
- as group moderation, spam and spew cancellations, article forgeries, and
- a few other limited circumstances; those people in charge of these
- duties are generally authorized to issue cancels directly relating to
- the job.
-
-
- E. When and why are cancel messages allowed?
-
- When Usenet was created, cancels were meant to be only issued by
- the original poster of a message. They were implemented so that someone
- could take back their words, remove information that was no longer
- accurate, replace inaccurate information, and other, similar purposes.
-
- As time went on, more uses for cancel messages have been found.
- Third party cancellations are now generally allowed if they are not
- content-based; posting private mail is often more than frowned upon, and
- newsgroup voting fraud may be stopped with a forged cancel; in the more
- extreme cases, ads to inappropriate groups are cancelled, threads that
- are crossposted to too many groups go away, and some even cancel in
- order to just disrupt a newsgroup. This is not to say that this is
- accepted; on the contrary, cancelling based on a new criterion is usually
- more than hotly contested.
-
- RFC1036bis, section 7.1, is the most "authoritative" list of valid
- reasons for cancel messages; however, because it is not a formal RFC and
- because Usenet changes so quickly, it should not be considered the final
- word on such matters. The following reasons are probably the most apt to
- be considered valid by any random news administrator:
-
- 1. First person cancels are performed by the original poster of a
- message. They are explicitly allowed by the news system - a user
- is always authorized to cancel anything that he or she posts, for any
- reason, within the limits imposed by his or her administrators, the
- moderators or maintainers of those groups affected by the cancels, and
- the user's individual moral code. This authority extends to messages
- written on another system.
-
- 2. Second person cancels are performed by those people officially "in
- charge" of a user - the user's news administrator, the newsgroup
- moderators and hierarchy maintainers affected by the user's posts,
- or any party authorized to act on their behalf by said user or
- administrator. These cancels, too, are officially authorized.
-
- 3. Third person cancels are generally frowned upon, unless they are
- made based on one of the following criteria:
-
- a. Moderator cancels
- The moderator of a newsgroup has absolute authority over that group.
- This includes the right to issue cancels for posts that he or she
- did not authorize. Retromoderation is a subset of this, in which
- the group is moderated only by the issuing of cancel messages;
- private hierarchies may generally be considered retromoderated by
- the hierarchy administrators, while in most most other hierarchies
- the legitimacy of retromoderation is still up for debate. For more
- information on creating moderated groups, see news.groups and/or
- news.groups.questions.
-
- b. Spam/EMP cancels
- Spam or EMP, a message posted to Usenet separately multiple times,
- is generally accepted as a major threat to Usenet. Therefore,
- anything posted too many times is automatically cancelled, with no
- regard to the content of the post. The current spam cancellation
- threshold is 20 posts; for more information, see the Spam Thresholds
- FAQ.
-
- c. Spew cancels
- A spew is a long series of similar articles posted over and over
- again, due either to a malfunctioning program or malicious intent.
- They are almost universally considered to be a good use for cancels.
- However, there has yet to be an accepted broad definition of the
- term "spew" - right now, it mostly fits under "I know it when I
- see it". For more discussion of spews, see news.admin.net-abuse.
- policy.
-
- d. ECP cancels
- ECP, or Excessive Cross-Posting, is when a message is posted to too
- many groups at the same time. Much the same as spam cancellations,
- if a message is crossposted to too many groups, it will be cancelled
- without regard to content. Currently, the cancellation threshold is
- a BI of 20 (the BI is "the sum of the square roots of the number of
- newsgroups in which each of the postings appears"); as with spam/
- EMP cancels, see the Spam Thresholds FAQ for details.
-
- e. Binaries in a non-binary group
- Much of Usenet does not want binary messages, usually for disk space
- and performance reasons. To accommodate those sites that do want
- binaries, the alt.binaries.* and comp.binaries.* hierarchies were
- created. However, there are still some binary messages posted to
- other Usenet groups; these are often cancelled without regard to
- content, based on the size of the binary. For more information, see
- news.admin.net-abuse.policy, where the specifics are being debated.
- The bincancel FAQ concerns binary cancels in particular.
-
- f. Forgeries in the user's name
- It has become more and more common for people to post messages with
- false attribution lines. If a message is attributed to a user, they
- may cancel it or authorize others to cancel it as if they had posted
- it themselves.
-
-
- F. How are they issued?
-
- Cancel messages are sent out as a standard Usenet post, except
- they contain a "Control: cancel <message-ID>" header. If a system that
- accepts cancels receives the message, the post with the specified
- message ID is deleted from that system.
-
- Most major newsreaders allow readers to cancel their own posts
- with a key press. Third-party cancels are more complicated, and must
- follow several conventions; please refer to section II.B for details.
-
-
- G. How do I cancel my own post?
-
- Most major newsreaders allow you to cancel your message with a
- few keypresses. To cancel your own post, press the following key
- (depending on your newsreader) while reading your message:
-
- Unix
- rn/trn: 'C' tin: 'D'
- gnus-emacs: 'C' nn: 'C'
- slrn: Esc-^C pine: none
-
- Unix/X
- xrn: 'Cancel' button
- knews: Post/Cancel Article
-
- OpenVMS
- Anu News 'cancel'
- newsrdr 'cancel'
-
- PC/Windows
- Free Agent - pre-v1.1: Article/Cancel
- - v1.1+: Message/Cancel Usenet Message
- Agent - v0.99g,v1.5: Post/Cancel Usenet Message
- - 1.9 or newer: Post/Cancel Usenet Message
- - other: Message/Cancel Usenet Message (other versions)
- Waffle: type CANCEL at the inter-message prompt
- News Xpress: Article/Cancel Post
- Turnpike: Article/Cancel Article
- WinVN: Article/Cancel
- News Xpress (Win3.1): Article/Cancel Post
- Anawave Gravity: Article/Cancel
- Outlook Express: Right Click on Message/Cancel
- Internet News: File/Cancel Message
-
- PC/OS/2
- NR/2: Article/Cancel
-
- Macintosh
- Nuntius: Articles/Cancel Article
- NewsWatcher: Special/Cancel Message
- MacSOUP: Message/Cancel
- most browsers: Special/Cancel Message
-
- Amiga
- Thor 2.6: Event Commands/Cancel Message
-
- Web Browsers
- Netscape: Edit/Cancel This Message (most versions 2.0+)
- Mosaic: none
- Lynx: none
- Internet Explorer 4.0: compose/cancel messages
-
- Generic/Multi-System
- Yarn: 'c'
-
-
- If you know of any other news readers that allow cancels, have
- corrections for any of the above readers, or whatever, please mail
- tskirvin@killfile.org with the information.
-
-
- H. Who decided on these rules?
-
- Usenet is a cooperative venture of many thousands of sites world-
- wide. It was designed with the principle of mass communication in mind;
- not much thought was put into security, because it didn't seem necessary
- at the time. As the need to control the system became evident, so too did
- the potential for abuse; out of these two needs, these rules grew.
-
- As for who actually designed the rules: each site owns its own
- machines, and can set set policy over its own systems and users. Each
- site can decide their own expiration policies, what other sites to accept
- messages from, what control messages they will accept, and so forth;
- however, it's generally much easier to have a standard set of rules to
- work with, to improve efficiency and promote some level of consistency
- across the network. These rules were designed by the system administrators
- in charge of the systems that Usenet runs on and the users that Usenet
- serves, in order to give a framework under which to run Usenet as a whole.
- In short: the rules were made by your administrators and those that they
- choose to listen to.
-
- And if you have any problems with this, you should see if you can
- make your administrators listen to you.
-
-
- II. How do cancels work?
- ========================
- A. What is control? control.cancel? How do I receive them?
-
- control is a pseudo-newsgroup made up of all posts on a news
- system containing the Control: header, which is used to create or delete
- newsgroups, perform internal systems checks, cancel posts, and so forth.
- It is mostly an administrative convenience.
-
- On many systems, control is broken up into several components
- automatically by the software. If this is true, there are several
- newsgroups: control.newgroup (for the creation of new groups),
- control.rmgroup (for the removal thereof), control.cancel (for cancel
- messages), and so forth. If the software is configured this way, cancel
- messages will appear in control.cancel.
-
- All cancels are either recorded in control or control.cancel,
- depending on the system type. If a post was cancelled recently enough, a
- record of the cancel *will* be here - if there is no cancel in the group,
- then either there was no cancel or the cancel message itself has expired
- (see section I.B.).
-
- Unfortunately, the latter situation has become more and more
- common as time passes. Most major news servers have begun to expire
- control messages after extremely short time periods, ranging from a couple
- of days to a couple of hours; even the major Usenet search engines have
- begun to cut short their cancel message archives. The rule of "no cancel
- message, no cancel" still holds, but more burden for finding the cancel
- message is being placed on the reader.
-
- If you cannot read control (or control.cancel), ask your news
- administrator for help.
-
-
- B. What standards are there for cancelling posts?
-
- When cancelling your own post, the only standards are the
- software requirements, which should be done automatically by whatever
- software you are using. Third-party cancels, however, have certain
- standards that should be followed.
-
- There are three main reasons for following these standards when
- using third-party cancels. First is to identify the canceller, which
- gives the practice accountability. The second is to make sure that a
- particular message is only cancelled once. Finally, some news
- administrators would rather not accept certain cancels, and a standard
- will allow them to opt out of the system.
-
- The first standard is simple to fulfill; all legitimate third-
- party cancels include an "X-Cancelled-By:" header, containing the email
- address where the canceller can be contacted. This also implies that the
- canceller is willing to respond to comments and complaints; if the mail is
- simply ignored, the canceller is violating this first standard.
-
- The second problem is solved much more creatively. The $alz
- convention (named after Richard Salz, the creator of INN), specifies
- that the message ID for a cancel message prepend the message ID of the
- original message with the string "cancel.". For example:
-
- Original Message ID: <48u6e8$lqi@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>
- Cancel Message ID: <cancel.48u6e8$lqi@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>
-
- The third problem, that of sites wanting to opt out certain
- types of cancels, can be solved by adding certain "pseudo-sites" to the
- path of the cancel; if a particular site wishes to not accept cancels
- of that type, they can alias out that pseudo-site. For information on
- how to do this, see section II.E.
-
- The commonly accepted pseudo-sites are as follows:
-
- cyberspam!usenet Spam/EMP cancels (universal)
- spewcancel!cyberspam!usenet Spew cancels
- mmfcancel!cyberspam!usenet Make.Money.Fast cancels
- bincancel!cyberspam!usenet Binary (in a non-Binary group) cancels
- adcancel!cyberspam!usenet Ad cancels (for the biz.* hierarchy only)
- retromod!cyberspam!usenet Retro-Moderation cancels
-
- The `!usenet' part denotes that something must come after that
- part of the path; it is not strictly necessary for it to be `usenet'.
- Multiple pseudo-sites may be used in one message.
-
- For more information on cancel formatting, please refer to the
- Newsgroup Care Cancel Cookbook by Rosalind Hengeveld <URL:http://www.
- xs4all.nl/~rosalind/faq-care.html>.
-
-
- C. What is the format of a cancel message?
-
- Here's an example, a spam cancel by Chris Lewis, that follows
- all of the standard conventions (plus a few extras), reformatted to fit
- into 80 columns:
- --
- Date: 8 Jun 1997 15:43:37 GMT
- Path: vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!ais.net!newsfeed.direct.ca!News1.Vancouver.iSTAR.net!
- news.istar.net!n1van.istar!hammer.uoregon.edu!nrchh45.rich.nt.com!bcarh8ac.
- bnr.ca!despams.ocunix.on.ca!cyberspam!not-for-mail
- From: clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis)
- Approved: clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca
- X-Cancelled-by: clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca
- Sender: Photorep45@ibm.net
- Newsgroups: alt.recovery.aa
- Subject: cmsg cancel <5ne625$f2b$25@news.internetmci.com>
- Control: cancel <5ne625$f2b$25@news.internetmci.com>
- X-No-Archive: Yes
- X-Spam-Type: WOODSIDE
- Lines: 7
-
- WOODSIDE spam cancelled by clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca
- Original Subject: Sell YourPhotosNYC.Agency
- Total spams this type to date: 1.758
- Total this spam type for this user: 1041
- Total this spam type for this user today: 503
- Originating site: internetmci.com
- Complaint addresses: spamcomplaints@mci.net postmaster@mci.net
- --
-
- Points to note: the 'Sender' line matches the original author of
- the message, while the 'From' line points at the canceller, as does the
- 'X-Cancelled-By' header. The Message-ID follows the $alz convention, and
- the proper pseudo-site is present in the 'Path' header. It should also be
- noted that the 'X-Spam-Type' and 'X-No-Archive' headers are optional, as
- is all information in the body of the cancel.
-
-
- D. Do all news sites accept cancels?
-
- No. Many news sites have decided that, for whatever reason, they
- do not want cancels; others merely do not want certain types of cancels.
- Dave Hayes, for example, runs a "Site of Virtue", which not only ignores
- cancels but drops them without distributing them; patches for INN to do this
- are available from his Freedom Knights Homepage, at <URL:http://www.jetcafe.
- org/~dave/usenet/>. America Online, Dejanews, Zippo, and many other news
- sites do not honor cancels of any sort.
-
-
- E. How do I alias out a pseudosite?
-
- INN v1.5 and beyond include shunning mechanisms out of the box;
- just edit the 'newsfeeds' file and follow the instructions from the
- comments. Other, older news server software is less likely to include such
- mechanisms.
-
- (If anyone's got information for other news servers, I'd love to
- include it.)
-
-
-
- III. So your post was cancelled...
- ==================================
- A. Why was my post cancelled?
-
- It probably wasn't.
-
- Unless you can find a copy of the cancel in control, it is very,
- *very* unlikely that your post was actually cancelled. Before you begin
- to worry about a forged cancel, figure out the expiration times for
- articles on your system and note whether or not your newsreader just
- refuses to show you articles marked as 'read'; these are the most common
- causes for "missing" articles.
-
-
- B. I have the cancel message right in front of me. Why was it cancelled?
-
- Most cancels nowadays are for cleanup of various forms of net-abuse.
- If you posted your message to too many places, or too many times, it will
- generally be cancelled, regardless of the content of the post.
-
- For details about what is cancelled and why, read news.admin.
- net-abuse.usenet, or check the news.admin.net-abuse FAQ. Also, if you
- received a mail on the subject from a spam cancellers, read it carefully;
- it should probably explain why your message was cancelled.
-
-
- C. But I wasn't doing anything wrong! Why was it cancelled?
-
- There's still legitimate reasons beyond official net-abuse to
- cancel posts.
-
- o The moderator of a moderated newsgroup is permitted to cancel any
- messages in his newsgroup that he does not approve of. There really
- isn't much recourse in this case; it's pretty much impossible to
- impeach a moderator, and the only thing you can really do about their
- actions is complain for a while or make a competing group.
-
- o Individual newsgroups and hierarchies, especially local hierarchies,
- may have rules permitting them to cancel messages posted there. Again,
- there isn't much you can do about these cases, beyond reasoning with the
- administrators and/or not using the hierarchy.
-
- o Your post may have inadvertantly triggered the searching criteria for
- a continuing spam. If you contact the spam-canceller in such a case,
- you can usually get your post re-posted and can be helped in making
- sure it won't happen again.
-
- o Your postmaster may have decided that they didn't like your post. In
- this case, the only real recourse you have is to get a new service
- provider.
-
-
- D. Look, pal, I said I wasn't doing anything wrong, and I meant it. I
- didn't break any rules that I can see. *Why was my post cancelled?*
-
- I don't know.
-
-
- E. *sigh* Then what do I do about it?
-
- Post about it to news.admin.net-abuse.usenet. Make sure to
- include the full headers and text of the cancel, an explanation of what
- the article was about, and any possible motives for the cancelling that
- you can think of. The administrators there will, if you're polite, try
- to help.
-
- For more information, read section V.
-
- --
- Copyright 1998, Tim Skirvin. All rights reserved.
- <URL:http://www.killfile.org/faqs/cancel.html>
-