Prevent Newsgroup Postings From Being Archived

You can prevent most Usenet archives from recording your newsgroup postings. Newsgroup archives save all messages on the Usenet, and other people will be able to retrieve your postings months and years later. You may not want this to happen for a couple of different reasons:

• Time. Your message is an informational type with a short time span of interest, like a notice for a weekly seminar, and doesn't add long term value to the Usenet.

• Personal. You are discussing sensitive or personal subjects, or have other privacy reasons.

You can prevent most newsgroup archives from saving your postings by putting the following command as the very first line, without any preceding blank lines or spaces:

x-no-archive: yes

Some Usenet news readers enable you to set a list of standard x-headers to every posting. If you wish, you can configure the "x-no-archive" option as one of these headers, so that it gets included in every one of your postings.

However, remember that your message will still be distributed across the Internet to news servers around the world, and anyone around the world will still be able to read it as long as their local news server carries it. Moreover, not all archives honour the x-no-archive option, and will archive your message anyway. Furthermore, if anyone replies to your message, and includes it inline to their reply without a x-no-archive in their own message, then your message will be included in the archives as part of their reply.