What are the rules & regulations of deleting self-authored Usenet posts?

There is no Usenet "headquarters." NNTP is a decentralized system. When you post to a newsgroup, your message is sent to your local news server. Other "nearby" servers then contact that server and retrieve your message, and they pass it on to their neighbors, and so on. You can send out a request to http://www.killfile.org/~tskirvin/faqs/cancel.html a message, but there's no guarantee that everyone with an archived copy of your message will receive (or honor) the cancellation.

If you don't want it read by your grandchildren, potential spouses, potential employers, whatever, do not say it on the internet, whether you use your real name or a pseudonym. Find every archiver you can and make your request. Good luck.

I'd trust that Google has become, for most people, the last word in Usenet, and just ask them to delete your posts from their archive. They might live on at some obscure NNTP server in Finland, but chances are nobody will look for them there.

Unless you can Google your name and find them.

I've done this. It can be done more often than you might think. Basically, you just have to find and contact the proper person for each site. That is the most difficult part. If the data is hosted on someone's personal website, then look through the content on the website for their email info, and ask them, being as specific as possible about what it is you want removed. The difficult cases are those where the stuff is hosted by some web company, and the account has expired yet it's still online, and the company either can't or won't contact the guy just to save you some headache. There is no easy way to do this. They can say no.

Is there some kind of "headquarters" that will remove your Usenet posts from all archiving sites? no ... there are many sites that archive Must Usenet posts be deleted at the request of the author, or can some authority refuse? they probably can ... back in my alt.flame days, on another crossposted group there was a guy who didn't want his posts archived, and put x-no-archive in his headers ... but some other guy put them up on the web ... in spite of much whining and complaining they stayed up in fact, usenet archivers aren't really obligated to obey the x-no-archive header ... even google keeps posts a few days before they disappear ... during which anyone on the internet can save the post and have a copy forever If someone copied & pasted your information into their post, is that portion removable by some authority? no At the very least, can you have your name or e-mail information erased from self-authored posts? no, although i believe that google munges e-mails basically, you're stuck with your eternal presence on usenet ... as am i, before i decided not to post under my real name anymore i guess that's the way fluffy, owner of news, wanted it

another note ... it's occured to me that, as others have said, most people check google, and google, if you're still in possession of the e-mail address you used for the posts in question, will cooperate with you ... (not sure what happens if you aren't) ... also, i'm not sure about this, but a lot of the other archivers started up much later than google, google having acquired the old dejanews service so it might not be as dire as you may think on the other hand, dejanews used to only go back to '91 ... and yet google now has archives for the 80s, too ... so somehow, someone was saving that information you never know ...

Also, keep in mind that even if you somehow manage to track down all your posts you can do nothing about any posts that quote you. So your stuff will likely still be out there in other people's quoted material.

Even if you can get Google and every other archive to delete your posts, you're still going to be searchable through all the people who quoted you while responding to whatever flames and vitriol you posted. I use a different name professionally so that I can't as easily be Googled.