Well I'm impressed by this

You'll be even more impressed when you learn to access Usenet directly instead of via Google Groups.

. . . and learn to quote the message you're replying to, so we know what you're talking about!

snipped-for-privacy@m45g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...

Maybe I'm just cynical thanks to many years on t'Web, but it looked more like blogspam to me anyway...

Indeed - exactly the same message was sent to more than one group. And it's gmail.

Strangely nether

Its sad that genuine gmail / google groups posters like myself get tarred with a dullards brush.

I've used usenet since 1993 through a variety of tools, but now as my internet access is spread across various PCs (some of which I own, some I don't) I find google groups access to usenet for posting purposes a really functional way to keep abreast of posts. I try to follow appropriate netiquette in terms of not top posting, snipping irrelevant details etc (though I'm sure I could do better).

But I post knowing that some people automatically discard postings from google groups, and that most people sneer at us.

Please treat us all on our merits - we're not all idiots that think that uk.d-i-y is a forum.......

Matt

Welcome to the board. :-)

Totally agree - there are plenty of reasons to use Google Groups. To be honest, I would rather like my newsreader to have a GG feature so that I can easily get archive posts without popping over to a browser. (Hmmm - maybe that is a feature I haven't noticed?)

Possibly - but gmail are a pain for allowing so much spam and doing nothing about it. Other ISPs do care more. I blocked gmail for a while and the spam level dropped considerably - both email and news.

Who does that?

And do you care? 8-)

I use Google Groups during the day, a real NNTP client at home.

While your comments may be valid as regards gmail offering opportunities to spam newsgroups, I think it is worth pointing out that gmail's control of spam to email inboxes is second to none.

I use gmail for my private email, and find that its handling of spam is outstandingly good. In the last year, out of tens of thousands of emails delivered to my inbox, I have had only four messages that I could describe as spam. A few genuine messages a week get delivered to my spam folder, but these are easy to spot because there is so little "real" spam.

I have also used Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, and while they have both improved considerably over the years, they are still way behind gmail.

So as an "ISP", I rate Google Mail (gmail) very highly indeed.

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes

I still do - is it better now ?

Can you whitelist usernames with 'ukdiy' in with your newsreader?

Might be a way to differentiate genuine gmail postings from the spam ones.

cheers, Pete.

While I have no figures as to how good Google' filters are - and I suspect they're pretty good, as they have so much data to work from - the fact that you don't see much spam means their filter isn't throwing up many "false negatives" - messages not tagged as spam when they are.

It says nothing about how many "false positives" - messages marked, and silently destroyed, when they aren't spam.

I get about 200 spams a day. About 3/4 of them get filtered automatically; I'd say 95% of the rest are also spam - but I like to check.

Andy

I doubt that there are many "false positives", if any.

I took up Google's invitation to try gmail (beta) in 2005. A large proportion of my incoming emails need my response, but I have never once had anyone contact me and ask me why I have not replied. With Hotmail, it used to happen several times a week.

I used to use various newsreaders from 1993 (Pine is the first one I remember), but I've used Google Groups for years now (since it was Dejanews). Clearly I'm odd, but I prefer it. In particular I find I can answer most of my uk.d-i-y questions by searching the archive without having to bother you all, and on those occasions when I do need to post it seems to make sense to do so through the same interface.

It's just another opportunity for snobbery on the part of people who are insecure and feel a need to denigrate others.

I am not interested in any of that. I concentrate on what people are saying, and I don't judge people by the route their message took to arrive on my screen. I have learnt a lot from other people on this newsgroup; whether they use a newsreader or post via Google Groups makes not the slightest difference.

Personally, I use Agent newsreader, but when I'm away from home I access newsgroups via Google. Either way, I'm the same person, but my ideas are apparently of less value if sent via Google Groups!

That cannot be true, they are pretty worthless regardless of which route they took. ;-)

Gmail keeps all it's 'identified spam' for 30 days anyway, so I skim it every couple of weeks. I think in two years I've found three posts that were false positives, and all did look a bit 'spammy'.

Thanks Paul. I had very low expectations of gmail, having been a very satisfied user of Hotmail since its introduction in 1996, before it was taken over by Microsoft.

It is far, far better than Hotmail. Presumably Google learned from Hotmail's mistakes, but it is a very user-friendly service and one that appears to work extremely well.