🚀 go-pugleaf

In news.admin.misc, Alan Ford <alan@whirlnet.demon.co.uk> writes:

> Stop trolling and try my idea instead. I think this should work, it
> certainly worked with my local inn newsserver.

> Make a posting to cancel, and get its message-id.

> Make another message, and set the subject to:
> 	cmsg cancel <message-id>
> where <message-id> is the message id of the message you want to cancel.

> Send it.

That will likely work on most places that honor cancels, but it's
deprecated.  (Special tokens in the subject header are bad; too prone to
accidents and other problems.)  The preferred method is to simply put the
header:

        Control: cancel <message-id>

in the article.  If you want your cancel to be effective on hosts that run
with VERIFY_CANCELS set (not that many these days), you also have to make
sure the From and Sender headers of your message match those of the
original message.

All of this is spelled out fairly clearly in RFC 1036, and most
newsreaders have the built-in capability to post cancels (but restrict it
to postings that they think the author has made, usually by checking
against the From header).

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>