Usenet is a distributed, broadcast medium, rather than a point-to-point medium, like Email or a find-and-view medium like the web. In a way, it's like a massive bulletin board, wt. anyone able to post and read the notes, all [supposedly] organized according to ever-increasingly narrow topical guidelines. This broadcast structure allows actual canceling of posted articles in addition to merely filtering spam out (such as can be done with email).

A list of spam cancel reports, and graphs for a period of time, which are good tools to use to track where the major distributors of spam are operating, is available on the Spam Tracking Page. One of the main reasons www.stopspam.org was brought online before it was truly ready for the public was to provide these reports for tracking. Unfortunately, the ability to create these manually on a day-to-day basis became too difficult, and had to be discontinued. Those created are left there as an example, and hopefully, someday we will be able to automate the process and return to having this resource available.

Here's another site that does spam tracking that you may want to cross-reference to: http://www.rahul.net/falk/

If you are a news administrator, and are looking for anti-abuse patches for your news software, there will be several to your liking on the News Server Software Patches page.

Those under threat of UDP and wishing to find out more, or just those curious as to what the heck a "Usenet Death Penalty" is, can go to the Usenet Death Penalty FAQ.