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 (until 2005) and Thor Kottelin (since 2007).

Cancelling an article you have posted

Sooner or later it will happen to you. You have 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 are a few reasons.

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

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 often they are also 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) honour cancels.

Usability 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 are 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, then 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 message - instructions by newsreader

Gnus (under Emacs)

1. Select the article and start reading it.
2. Press C (capital) 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 cannot 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)

These instructions are for version 2.0b27. Other versions may vary.

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.

Thanks to an anonymous contributor, 6 Jan 1996.

nn (UNIX)

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

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

pine (UNIX, DOS)

pine does not have a built-in cancel feature.

However, it is possible to cancel articles by manually creating the necessary header lines. Detailed instructions can be found in Nancy McGough's news article Pine.WNT.4.10.9904191325060.-456319@aleph, which is available at least through Google Groups.

Thanks to Gotfryd Smolik, 29 May 2008. (An acknowledgement mailed to Gotfryd bounced with the message We don't accept mail from spammers.)

rn, trn (UNIX)

1. Select the article and start reading it. In order to show articles you have already viewed, you will probably have to use the U (capital) command while looking at the thread selector,
2. While you are reading the article—or at its end—press C (capital) 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. The contributor is unsure as to whether this also works in rn.

slrn (UNIX, VMS)

1. In article mode, select the article that is to be cancelled.
2. Press Esc, then Ctrl-C.

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

Tin (UNIX)

While viewing 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. If it has not yet appeared, locate it in a mailroom view (File/New maillist/Mailroom).
2. Select Cancel article from the article menu. A new window, containing the details of the message to be cancelled, will appear.
3. The body text of the message should be edited to indicate why the message is being cancelled. This is not strictly necessary, but it is polite since at some sites humans will look at the cancels.
4. Press Post, go online and send the cancel.

Of course, you can only cancel your own messages. The article you are cancelling must be in the newsgroup on your computer, 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. In the article text window, select File/Cancel article.

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

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