In-line:

In article ,
"Chrissy" wrote:

Yes but these ARENT moderated groups.

They do not have to be for the creator of the group to have some
control

Nope - the creator of an unmoderated group has no more control than
anyone else, except (a) on their own server(s) and (b) to the extent
that they can persuade other newsserver owners. (B)'s extent is
normally about zero.

MS could (and does) limit content on the msnews servers (they
obviously delete most spam and appear to be restricting attachments
over a certain size). But that has no effect on what exists on, say,
m.p.e.programming when read from a different server.

I do not have a problem with downloading from the NG - I have
a problem with the number of people who appear to have my
e-mail addy in their address book and also have an infected system.

Nobody has to have your email addy in your address book. The swen
worm not only looks in the infected computer's address book, but
also harvests recently posted addresses from newsgroups. So your
posting your last message with your email address guarantees that
you'll be getting more spam, even if MS blocked all attachments and
filtered out all spam, since the harvest can occur on any newsserver.

I suggest you cut down the crossposting if you reply
I only read microsoft.public.excel.programming

I posted to all the NG one of these "security updates" was posted to
and you replied to all those groups. I did not expect a reply and had
no idea which NG you replied in.

That's why the Followup-To: header exists. Cross-post to many, but
set followup to only one. Anyone with a decent newsreader will then
automatically reply only to the followup group.