Hello there weird-being-who-sounds-angry, Sorry for offending you, but
i was just musing;
didn't think you'd actually keep track of this old post and wasn't
expecting anyone on rec.gardens to read what i posted, or reply to it,
so your replies come as a suprise.
Can you mark posts and be notified when new-entries crop up ? How do i
do that ?

I'm from Bangalore, India. My name is Vivek (Vee wake) and i'm a
student. I'm new here and experimenting a bit. You are partly right
about the "forcing bit"; I think i phrased that in-correctly !

I guess what i meant was: If everyone coded their news clients to
filter messages via digital-signatures, then you'd only read messages
from known entities. You could even embed the signature within the post
so there would be no problem dis-seminating the signatures. This
trouble comes with newbies; since their messages would be filtered out
with the SPAM, hence the need for a web-site where you register your
signature. This would then "force" newbies to register else they would
not be heard.

It's a silly idea though to rely on http, in the sense that you'd be
relying on http to fix nntp; A protocol should in most cases stand
alone, not rely on another protocol to fix bugs in it.

Kill-files don't really work; It's very easy to fake the headers in
newsgroups. Just go to any of a dozen free ISP's and fake the From,
Reply-To, and other fields. You'd have to block based on ISP ip, but
there are too many ISP's and you just might block legit users; It's a
kludgy solution at best.

The only thing you can trust to a certain extent is the Path: field
since that's entered by the machines handling your message. You seem to
be logging on from be5.nntpserver.

Quite honestly, I don't want to block or quarrel with you; that would
be silly ! I'm not sure if i like you, but i don't dislike you as off
now. If things did get messy i'd just ignore you ( visually speaking )
and carry on.You seem knowledgeable and i'd like to talk to you, if
that's okay with you.

I found some of your spammy-posts very intruging and that made me
lookup the rfc's to see what was going on. It's been fun all in all,
wondering what was going on and stuff *grin*.

Anyway..umm..i'll post my doubts and you can clarify if you wish to..I
suppose i could post on one of the comp forums and get my answers, but
since you have replied i just thought i might as ask my questions and
be done with it.

1. Is there a way to fake Path, without you owning a nntp server or
cracking in-to a nntp server. I don't think so, but..what do you feel ?

2. The From: field "~¤1¤ôx@ôÜ1Ô.ôôô" that's 8 bit ASCIIright?
Does "Forte" allow you to type 8 bit ASCII ?

3. What's the difference between Date and NNTP-Posting-Date? Is Date
generated by "Forte" and the Posting-Date by the first nntp/uucp server
to receive your post?

4. Is Message-ID generated by your client or by the server. RFC 850
says it's the server that first enters your post into the network;
ax.com in this case..I suspect that it's your machine hostname because
the timezone's match up -0500 is in America and ax.com is in the same
time zone (via jwhois).

Hope you can clarify.