I wasn't "tech awakened" at this time, so I simply didn't know which programs were used. What I can say is that plenty of spammers would have one or two posts

I wasn't "tech awakened" at this time, so I simply didn't know which programs were used. What I can say is that plenty of spammers would have one or two posts on Newsgroups, before the mods would catch them and ban their email address. Depending on the Newsgroup, I'm sometimes "new users" would have all of their posts reviewed before their posts were forwarded to everyone else. But after being added to some kind of whitelist, they could say whatever they wanted (well, until a flamewar caused them to go over the line and get banned). So similar tools as moderators use today on Reddit / IRC / whatever. Or at least, it felt like that to me. Maybe it differed in implementation, but the overall effect was the same.