From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Sep 25 22:57:15 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id WAA13190 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 25 Sep 1995 22:57:15 -0700 Received: from pelican.com (pelican.com [134.24.4.62]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with SMTP id WAA13184 for ; Mon, 25 Sep 1995 22:57:10 -0700 Received: from puffin.pelican.com by pelican.com with smtp (Smail3.1.28.1 #5) id m0sxT0u-000K2mC; Mon, 25 Sep 95 22:57 WET DST Received: by puffin.pelican.com (Smail3.1.29.1 #9) id m0sxT0t-0000ReC; Mon, 25 Sep 95 22:57 PDT Message-Id: Date: Mon, 25 Sep 95 22:57 PDT From: pete@puffin.pelican.com (Pete Carah) To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: multiple mail messages In-Reply-To: <199509242106.OAA03837@phaeton.artisoft.com> Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk In article <199509242106.OAA03837@phaeton.artisoft.com> Terry writes: >I've sometimes wondered if it's worthwhile to hack the mail tools for a >message id field to be respected by majorodomo when handling mail from >someone on the basis of crossposts. >I've also wondered about changing the header rewrite to be more elm >friendly. The elm program has "r(eply)" and "g(roup reply", and the >way the headers come in from the mailing lists means you can "r" to the >original sender or "g" to the mailing lists. ..... >One soloution would be to have majordomo delete duplicate targets from >the to line. That is, if it goes to multiple lists, then send it once >to the recipients that are on multiple lists. > >This would require a n:m map of actual recipient lists and an i:j map >to lists based on a message id field. It's questionable whether this >is realistic, given the processing requirements. It is a somewhat harder problem than the netnews one but not much. I'll admit that even here with only 3 sites being fed and 50-100mb/day of news my history file is >40mb (but it works comfortably with a full-time 14.4k link to the net and another single 14.4k for uucp). Does the sum of all these lists approach 10mb/day? (and what is the average message length? in netnews not counting the pictures groups it is very close to 2K.) I feed all these lists into newsgroups here so even if I get extra copies (from lists) I don't see them :-) (and I look at mail first so any personal replies I got can be ignored from trn's thread menu later when I look there.) That way I get subject grouping (though 'references' isn't preserved so I don't get good threading) ... >Finally, this would once again break elm, since duplicate message would >be distributed to a single list by list order of the recipient, and the >use of the elm "filter" program would not guarantee proper list ordering. > >For instance, a crosspost to current/questions/hackers that "belonged" >on questions would go to hackers only for the hackers+questions-list >members, current for the current+hackers+questions-list and the >current+questions-list and the current-list members, etc. The way I have the newsgroups worked out here I'd get all of them but then the message-id dups would eliminate all but the first. The crossposts would disappear here too, unless mail2news was smart enough to generate a crosspost newsgroups: line on the first message :-( Are there enough directly-connected or even well-connected uucp sites that a news feed of all these groups would make sense? (I use freebsd.questions, etc here for local names, for example). I could certainly handle redistributing it in the Southern Calif area from a T1-connected site (not here, though it wouldn't be *that* hard even here if done as news) (said T1 site is a pair of ISPs using fbsd for (almost) all of their servers... (and I'm also set up to mail locally from news if it makes sense; I already do this to get stuff to a couple of dos hosts from the earthquakes news groups.) A news distribution could even be done in parallel with mail if the gateway were careful enough to never change msg ids... (Wildcat and fido aren't so nice :-( -- Pete