egafd.com

A while ago I subscribed to a few adult newsgroups but thought that most of the content was crap to be honest. What did bother me though was that a minority of message headers on some of these groups were clearly advertising/containing illegal material. Obviously I didn't click on any of these messages but I can't remember whether I had 'mark all messages as read' on at the time. That option doesn't download every message to your hard drive does it including each attachment? I have unsubscribed from each newsgroup but am still worrying about it.
Can anyone advise here?

delete *.dbx files in
C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Identities\{6CF0B157-27B6-4127-B9BA-F5FA35C2F45B}\Microsoft\Outlook Express\

or
C:\Windows\Application Data\Outlook Express\{GUID}
reference
http://www.tomsterdam.com/insideoe5/files/store.htm

Download Evidence Eliminator and run it every so often. It scrubs your hard drive and not even the fbi can reconstruct it. Totally safe.

In answer to the question:

> That option doesn't download every message to your hard drive
> does it including each attachment?

No. It certainly doesn't do that. What happens is your newsreader keeps a list of all the article numbers that you have "marked as read" so that next time you view that newsgroup it can display the list of articles in that group appropriately (perhaps it will put the "read" ones in a different colour, or won't display them at all, whatever, depending on how things are set up) This is just so you can tell which are the new postings.

Also, marking as read is a purely local operation on your computer - it doesn't do anything on the server.

What would be more interesting to a policeman would be to check the logs on the ISP's news server and to see which IP addresses had been downloading which articles - there's an page mentioning this possibility at (right at the top) which is quite an interesting read.

Whether the ISP gave up its logs to the police is contested in this case, the police apparently saying they did and the ISP apparently saying they didn't!

I don't think that anyone using newsgroups to access "normal" articles and attachments should have anything to be bothered about by this. I think the police are more interested in knowing which people are (or were!) using some specific newsgroups which are largely used by people wanting to get (or distribute) child porn - in other words, that is the main focus of those newsgroups.