[floren]

At least the last time I looked, Usenet spam was so lazy that it was pretty easy to filter: the exact same ads posted again and again (filter the article title), or schizophrenics posting under the same username 100 times a day (filter the name). Usenet clients made it pretty easy, once you learned the right commands, to instantly shitcan all future messages which matched [sender/title/some string in the body/etc.]

Unfortunately, while it's easy to filter stuff, it means that every newcomer sees the unfiltered crap and has to figure out filtering for themselves.

[pwg]

The vast bulk of USENET spam is arriving /from/ google groups.

A very effective spam filter is to simply killfile anything with an @google.groups message id.

Sadly, that also killfiles the few real posters who use GG, so if one wants to continue to see them, one has to add them as overrides to the general "kill GG" filter.

[pasc1878]

Add to the fun GFoogle Groups have stopped carrying some groups because they had too much spam. As others noted much of it was coming from google groups itself, if only it had the spam filters other usenet providers had.