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Date:      7 Jan 1999 21:32:51 +0100
From:      naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber)
To:        freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: News Server
Message-ID:  <7735lj$cuq$1@mips.rhein-neckar.de>
References:  <199901052151.OAA06423@gongshow.masterplan.org>

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In article <199901052151.OAA06423@gongshow.masterplan.org>,
Jason George <jbg@masterplan.org> wrote:

> Because forwarding the FreeBSD lists via UUCP home would be evil 

(Why? You are aware of batched SMTP, aren't you? I get quite a chunk of
the freebsd-lists by E-mail to my UUCP home site, and it doesn't hurt
me.)

> 3) The scripts do not like cross-posts at all.  Only one group will get 
> the post.  Anyone wanting to hack the code to correct this should 
> contact me.  I don't have the time or resources to do this.

This is a basic problem of mail->news gateways. Those "crossposts"
arrive as separate mail messages that share the same message ID. This
works for mail, but not for news, where a message ID is *unique*. The
first message is gatewayed, further ones will be refused as duplicates
by the news system.

(You could "solve" this by giving out new message IDs. However, this
would be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. Replys sent in
response to the articles would reference the munged IDs, breaking
threading. Bad. Also, if you munge message IDs and your mail->news
gateway interacts with a rogue news->mail gateway, the result will be a
catastrophic feedback loop. Don't say it won't happen. I've seen too
many people munging message IDs between Usenet and BBS networks and
claiming nothing would happen. Catastrophic duplicate spews did happen
regularly. Don't munge message IDs in newsgroups. Never ever.)

Setting up a local mail->news gateway is a trivial exercise. I have one
running here for my personal consumption (on a, dare I say, Linux box).
While not perfect, Rich $alz' mail2news program from his newsgate
package does quite a nice job.

Generally I suggest setting up *local* mail->news gateways, not
propagating the groups, and if you're a feeder site, keeping the gateway
on a separate news server.

You can make the groups moderated, set the moderator address to the
submission address of the source mailing list, and inews will
automatically forward attempts to post a followup article to the mailing
list. Very nice. Alas, this doesn't work for freebsd-*, because such
messages will have Path and Newsgroups header fields, and our dear
FreeBSD postmaster filters all submissions that appear to bear the
dreadful mark of Usenet. Of course this, uh, questionable policy can be
circumvented again.



PS: What is this thread doing in freebsd-current?

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                  naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de
  See another pointless homepage at <URL:http://home.pages.de/~naddy/>.


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