"Harry Bloomfield" wrote in message
news
newshound explained :
On 3/21/2017 3:14 PM, critcher wrote:
Would I be correct in assuming that most of the posters and readers on
this ng are of a mature age. i.e. 55 - 80 yrs.
It is difficult to guess age from a posting, but from the info given
out, there seems to be an abundance of wisdom here.

And a fair number of cranky attitudes too.

Usenet does not have the traffic it once did; my suspicion is that the
younger element congregate to what might be perceived as the slightly
more social environment of the web based bulletin boards, plus of course
the social media.

I didn't discover Usenet until the early 2000's, I had heard of it, but
just couldn't work out how to get to actually make use of it. I had used
email and some home Internet via Free something-or-other for many years.

Now I have a raft of devices all making use of my broadband, but I am
always left wondering if I might be missing out on something, like I
missed out on Usenet for many years. One thing I really ought to do, is
get my head around setting up an email server, rather than the mess I have
at present of each system grabbing mail from my accounts when its turned
on.

Doing your own email server isnt a trivial exercise and doesn't
really get you much instead of just getting your own domain
and using some decent email server.

The main problem with that approach is that some like godaddy
can get a bit gung ho about blacklists at times and you can find
you don't get some mail if you go that route if they decide that
a mailing list you are on by choice is actually a spammer etc.

But getting as good a result with spam filtering as you get with
gmail without any effort at all is a hell of a lot harder to do than
you might think. There's a reason gmail leaves the rest for dead
in that regard. IMO that's because they get vastly more email
moving thru their system than you will ever get and that allows
them to automatically check whats spam very easily just from
the volume of close to identical posts from particular sources etc.

Not clear how they work out what is mailing lists and what is
real spam tho, but they do that very effectively indeed and
hardly ever end up getting that wrong.

Mine that I use in usenet is a real email, not munged, altho
it looks like it is, and I just don't ever get any spam ending
up in the inbox or stuff that should end up in the inbox
ending up in the spam folder either.

And the latest approach of allowing you to put anything
you like after a + sign in the part before the @ allows you
to label things so you can track who has let your email
escape their system or has flogged it to spammers, at least
until the spammers auto strip what follows the + too.