According to SteveB meagain@rockvilleUSA:

"Bert Byfield" wrote in message
46.128...
I may have read a previous post on why this isn't practical in a
previous post but I can't find it. It has become difficult to
even scan the 'Subjects' and separate the legit ones from all of
the advertising. Sorry for my obvious ignorance.

The spammers keep (on purpose) making new subjects to avoid being
filtered into the trash. So spam filtering is an art, not a science.

And, as swatting mosquitos, an exercise in futility.

Not necessarily if you do it right.

[I (currently) do email spam filtering for a living. Used to do a
lot with Usenet spam filtering. But retired from that almost 8 years
ago.]

Trying to do spam filtering just for yourself by tuning your own filters
by hand, usually is a huge waste of effort. Except in relatively limited
circumstances, you have to understand a lot more about the underlying
technologies, and understand what the better techniques are.

Blocking individual froms or even domains is usually an exercise
in futility, and is mostly ineffective at blocking spam. Something
smarter/self-tuning like cleanfeed (server level utility) or Bayesian
will do better.

Killfiles (blocking domains, path tails, messageids etc) is usually
most effective for ignoring trolls and the like, not spam.

Though, if you've decided that Google is the source of all spam
in this group (I would disagree with that characterization),
something simple suffices. But you probably won't be that
pleased with the result.

Learn to dance around the dog****.

Getting a better newsreader always helps ;-)

I use something particularly prehistoric (trn - a UNIX command line reader
with roots more than 20 years ago). The reason it does well is because
it shows a threaded view of the subjects. Rather than seeing each article
in the index, you just see the thread. Thus, each index page has
a lot of threads, and it's easy to discard (ignore unread) whole pages
of thread listings. I scan thru 1000+ postings in a matter of a minute
or two, only reading the ones that look interesting. I barely notice
any spam in the group.

There are other readers these days with such capabilities. Such
as Gnus, slrn, and Forte Agent. The latter is Windows-based, and lots
of people really like it.

I'm somewhat out of touch on the newer readers. But neither Outlook
nor Netscape are much good with high volume groups.

Thunderbird isn't too bad, but I prefer my trn ;-)
--
Chris Lewis,

Age and Treachery will Triumph over Youth and Skill
It's not just anyone who gets a Starship Cruiser class named after them.