RAS SPAM - What can be done?

On 2/22/18 3:05 PM, Frank Whiteley wrote:
On Thursday, February 22, 2018 at 1:25:36 PM UTC-7, Chip Bearden wrote:
I also report as abuse, SPAM. Not sure it has any impact on anything except my view of the postings list but there does seem to be less recently. I've thought about reporting it as abuse, violence, wondering if that would have more impact. But I didn't want to attract attention from the FBI or militant/litigious First Amendment guardians.

Chip Bearden

Google removed the AbuseOff Topic option. One post indicated that the offending account was new, so apparently the old account was blocked or cancelled. Enough abuse complaints, they'll move to another account unless Google can block else wise. At least some are posted from the UAE.

Frank Whiteley


Certainly do not reply to the spam messages. As already mentioned doing
that makes them more visible to other users. And the spammers will love
the attention.

Unfortunately these come from people injecting spam via Google Groups.
Google could easily address this if they have a flying fark, but they
apparently don’t. If you know folks who work at Google complain at them...

Flagging content as spam within Google Groups often eventually results
in it being hidden from other users, but after far too long a delay and
with far too little proactive response to concurrent/subsequent spam posts

The best advice is probably skip Google Groups and use a different news
reader like Thunderbird and a service provider like Eternal September.
And work out how to use killfiles (how spam was has always been handled
on USENET, and unlike Google, USENET server administrators/service
providers would actively go after and shut down spam posters).

Since much of r.a.s. is USA specific a better long term plan might be to
move those discussions elsewhere especially now that Google has helped
damage USENET.