RE: No postnews or other Usenet news utilities?

[Owen Rees <owen dot rees at hp dot com>]

--On Wednesday, May 24, 2006 21:54:12 -0400 Bruce Wehr wrote:

> No, I am not a spammer.

--On Wednesday, May 24, 2006 13:38:22 -0400 Bruce Wehr wrote:

> Anyway, Xnews has an arbitrary limit on cross posting to 20 groups at a
> time.  Yesterday, I spent quite a bit of time going through all the
> *.forsale groups, selecting 20 at a time, excluding item specific ones
> (like computers or homes) and sending my ad.  It took quite a bit of time
> and was insanely repetitive.  Imagine my surprise when I used Google
> Groups today to search Usenet, only to find that my articles never made
> it out!  <ARRGH!>

Whatever definitions you or I may have for 'spam' and 'spammer' are 
irrelevant. What matters is the definition used by those who cancel spam. 
Dave Korn mentioned "the BI>20 definition of spam" presumably assuming that 
everyone knows that BI stands for "Breidbart Index", knows how it is 
calculated, and knows that 20 is the threshold generally accepted by those 
who actively cancel spam.

BI is the sum of the square roots of the number crossposts of messages 
similar enough to be considered equivalent. "insanely repetitive" suggests 
more than 5 posts to 20 groups and since 5*sqrt(20)>22 that has exceeded 
the threshold used as the definition of cancellable spam by those who 
actively cancel spam.