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Ian Malcolm

wrote:
sorry guys It will not happen again...
I'm new to all this so cut me a little slack
have a good day everyone.......

If you *really* have reformed your ways, it would be worth your while to
get a new domain name and email address. Its too late for the old ones,
*someone* will have them in a public blacklist somewhere so they are
forever tainted . . .

You could redirect your old ones to the new ones so you dont have to
immediately reprint all your paper advertising.

NEVER post an advertisment or commercial announcement to a USENET group
without checking that its *explicitly* permitted under that groups
charter (google 'groupname charter') and its also advisable to check
if there is a group FAQ as well.

USENET is *NOT* GOOGLE GROUPS, USENET is a world wide distributed
bulletin board system that grew out of the UNIX programming community in
the early '80s. Google is just a gateway and an archive. There *ARE*
google's own groups, but they dont propagate outside google. Clueeless
Google posters have replaced clueless AOLers as the main source of
unwanted gabble on USENET. If you post via google, you will need to
maintain a higher standard of nettiquette than average to be taken
seriously.

Its a *LOT* of work to achive any recognition on USENET that actually
translates into real customers, as it will take a lot of providing
helpful answers to peoples questions before people trust your advice and
start contacting you directly. I *hope* you have an interest in boats
other than just selling them, as if so, skim the last few months of
rec.boats, rec.boats.cruising and rec.boats.electronics, then lurk until
someone posts a question you can answer well, If the answer is 'I can
supply that locally, email me' so be it but dont offer anything for sale
unasked. Mostly you need to just be giving good advice. (Dont try to
get 'cute', there are many former boaters who have given up for health
reasons, who have *nothing* better to do than check posting histories
and locations etc. to see if a question was asked purely to give a
spammer an excuse to reply with a blatently commercial post. Also you
*dont* want to have this grief twice.)

Finally, protect your email address against spammers (hint, they
download headers not whole messages so put your real email in the
signature not the from field and if you fake an address for from, make
sure its either .invalid TLD or @example.com so noone else gets spam
targeted for you dumped on them) and pick a posting name that if its not
your real name, at least is a human name you are happy to anwer to if
someone contacts you. . .

This is all the slack you are likely to get around here and more than
many would cut you. If in doubt ask first, forgiveness afterwards is
rarely granted. Good Luck.

--
Ian Malcolm. London, ENGLAND. (NEWSGROUP REPLY PREFERRED)
ianm[at]the[dash]malcolms[dot]freeserve[dot]co[dot]uk
[at]=@, [dash]=- & [dot]=. *Warning* HTML & 32K emails -- NUL:
'Stingo' Albacore #1554 - 15' Early 60's, Uffa Fox designed,
All varnished hot moulded wooden racing dinghy.