This article is based on material authored by members of the news.newusers.questions Moderation Board and nnq-workers mailing list, particularly by Jon Bell. The original article was last updated in 2005.

Cancelling an article that you've posted

Sooner or later it will happen to you. You've posted an article and then realized that you've committed a horrendous faux pas. Or there's a really stupid typo or misspelled word. Or you just plain goofed up a crucial fact. Or you've advertised something for sale, sold it almost immediately, and your mailbox is still filling up with offers.

Most newsreader programs allow you to send cancel messages regarding articles that you've written. In theory, a "cancel" should delete the original article from your own news server. It should also propagate to other news servers, asking them to also delete it, which they should.

The news protocol also allows for an article to supersede an earlier version of the same article, removing the latter. The supersession mechanism has many of the same strengths and weaknesses cancels have.

Why a cancel message might fail

Sending a cancel message is usually easy. Detailed instructions for a selection of newsreaders are available below.

However, you can no longer rely on a cancel to actually remove your article from a newsgroup. Here's why.

Vandalism

Nowadays cancel messages are highly abused. Because cancels are easy to falsify, and because vandals often send huge amounts of forged cancels, it is becoming less and less common for news servers to act on cancel messages.

Vigilantism

Additionally, even if a cancel initially is successful, there are resurrection robots that may repost the original article (on the assumption that the cancel was illegitimate).

Propagation outside newsgroups

Netnews articles are exchanged between news servers, but they are also often automatically gatewayed to mailing lists and web-based archives. Additionally, they may be manually quoted somewhere. Such media often do not (or even, by design, cannot) honor cancels.

Useability issues

Article expiration

Most newsreaders allow you to cancel an article only while the article has not yet expired on your news server, so that you can call it up and read it again. If the article has already expired from your server, you're probably out of luck.

You could compose and inject your cancel message manually; the protocol specification does explain how, but if you are new to newsgroups, you might want to choose a gentler learning curve.

Email address settings

If you follow the instructions, but get an error message that says something like You can't cancel someone else's article, that means that your newsreader was not installed properly. Complain to your system administrator about it, if he/she installed your newsreader. If you installed it, check your documentation and make sure that your newsreader and news server software agree on what your email address in the From: line should be.

If you were trying to cancel someone else's article, please be aware that falsifying cancel messages is a severe breach of netiquette.

How to send a cancel - instructions by newsreader

Gnus (under Emacs)

1. Select the article and start reading it.
2. Press C (upper-case) to cancel it (function `gnus-summary-cancel-article')

Thanks to Nat Makarevitch (nat at nataa.frmug.fr.net), 8 Oct 1995.

Netscape (Macintosh, Windows)

Netscape versions prior to 2.0 can't cancel articles.

In version 2.0, use the Cancel command in the Edit menu. (The editor seems to recall that a similar command is available in newer versions as well.)

NewsWatcher (Macintosh)

Select Cancel Article command from the Special menu. This can be done while reading the article or while the article is selected in the author/subject window. BTW, this is for v2.0b27. Other versions may vary (but I doubt it).

Thanks to an anonymous contributor, 6 Jan 1996.

nn (UNIX)

1. Select the article and start reading it.
2. Press C (upper-case) to cancel it.

Thanks to Wolfgang Schelongowski (spamtrap at xivic.prima.de), 30 Sep 1995.

pine (UNIX, DOS)

Sorry, pine can't cancel articles. Get a real newsreader! :-)

rn, trn (UNIX)

1. Select the article and start reading it. You'll probably have to use the U (upper-case) command while looking at the thread selector, to show you previously-read articles.
2. While you're reading the article, or at its end, press C (upper-case) to cancel it.

If you want to post a corrected version of the article, press Z instead. Then you can edit the article, and trn will post it in such a way that it simultaneously cancels the old version. (This works in trn, but I don't know if it works in rn, too.)

slrn (UNIX, VMS)

1. In article mode, select the article that is to be canceled.
2. Then press Esc, then Ctrl-C.

Thanks to John E. Davis (davis at space.mit.edu), 3 Oct 1995.

Tin (UNIX)

While you're looking at the article text (you may have to use r to toggle read/unread articles), just press D (must be capital).

Thanks to an anonymous contributor, 8 Oct 1995.

Turnpike (Windows)

1. Select the article in the newsgroup (or if it has not yet appeared, by locating it in a mailroom view (file/new maillist/mailroom).
2. Then select cancel article from the article menu. A new window will appear containing the details of the message to be canceled.
3. The body text of the message should be edited to indicate why the message is being canceled (this is not strictly necessary, but it is polite to indicate why since at some sites humans will look at the cancels).
4. Then press post, go online and send the cancel.

You can only (of course) cancel your own messages. The article you are canceling must be in the newsgroup on the dialup machine or in the record of outgoing articles.

Thanks to Richard Clayton (richard at turnpike.com), 19 Sep 1995.

WinVN (Windows. Versions above 0.99.4)

1. In the group list window, open the article.
2. Then in the article text window, just Select File/Cancel article.

You may edit the text of the cancel article. This is only possible on articles you've written.

Thanks to Christian Perrier (bubulle at bubhome.frmug.fr.net), 4 Oct 1995.