> At risk of dipping into as subject which I know zilch
> about and others surely have contemplated lots:
>
> Shouldn't a cancellation automatically invoke a
> notice to the person in the Reply-to: field?
Actually er no..
The original Idea. when everyone who was on usenet was at an academic,
Government military or defence contractor site was that the only one who
could/would cancel a post was the originator. Therefor the originator
would know about it....
Anyone who did not play by the rules whould get their net-access cut off.
It would be tricky to set up a robot to notify the users about cancels,
because if there were to be 100 sites with the robot, you would get 100
e-mail notifications for EACH cancel. My wife's FAQ runs 10 posts these
days, if someone did not like skating (or just shotguunned all the
postings) that would mean that she would get 1000 e-mails.
If the effect is not clear, try posting on alt.test, or can.test. You
will hear from several robots that tell you that your post was received
in Korea or South africa.
One slightly more technical problem is that when you superseed (sp) the
old version with a new version, that itself is handled by usenet as the
equivent of a cancel message.
Charles MacDonald Stittsville Ontario cmacd@achilles.net
--- Just beyond the fringe ---
<a href="http://www.achilles.net/~cmacd/">homepage</a>
CANDU Nuclear Power - The answer to greenhouse gas