>>> Who here has been in such a news war ... I was involved in a slightly different news war a few years ago. I was being harrassed by a particularly prolific news poster (at one point he represented nearly 9% of the total USENET weekly volume), and it turned out that I was running a site that had an NNTP feed to his site. I talked with the admin there, found out their fan-out plan, and made sure that anything I got from them got fanned out as soon as possible. Except I would modify the message in subtle ways, like change the attribution line from something like From: john@somesite.net (John Q. Public) to From: john@somesite.net (Wimpy Math Grad Student) Anyway, I was able to make my version of his postings "the" version by hitting all the other sites his site fanned out to first. It was fun for a while until he found out and tried to mail bomb me. Fortunately, I was around when it started, and put a reflector in to send his bombs back automatically piece by piece. His machine was a lowly VAX 750 running some backwater rev of 4.3 alpha-alpha, and sendmail promptly sent the load to 40 and crashed the machine. His PhD advisor was not amused. /jordan