utgpu Usenet antispam measures

Our primary Usenet antispam measure is narf, our Usenet antispam filtering system for CNews. Narf is a simple program that requires almost no changes to your CNews configuration; you can have it apply to either incomming NNTP news feeds, local posts, or both. It has had a dramatic impact here on the amount of Usenet spam we must deal with.

You might think that running software to despam your Usenet feed would make your news machine perform worse. Instead, it turns out that despamming can make your machine run better. In addition to the performance benefits, you will probably be able to extend article expiration times and in general give your users a newsfeed with less junk in it.

We have made a number of modifications to CNews, such as adding the ability to shun sites and refuse articles crossposted into certain hierarchies. Many of them have been made obsolete by narf; the remaining ones we may package up for distribution someday.

General references

Usenet despamming software is now available for most if not all Unix newsreader and newsfeeder systems and can give your machine a substantial performance boost (depending on how much you throw away). The best central web page of Usenet antispam filters that we have found is Jeremy Nixon's Anti-Spam Software web page.

Further information

Our Usenet despamming software is part of our antispam software that we are making available to the Internet community. You might also be interested in the reports produced by our software.


This page and much of our precautions are maintained by Chris Siebenmann, who hates junk email and other spam.