From: cactus@seabsd.hks.net (L. Todd Masco)
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 94 11:42:28 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: News->Mail & CMU's Andrew Message System
Message-ID: <199412121947.OAA22152@bb.hks.net>
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L. McCarthy <lmccarth@ducie.cs.umass.edu> wrote:
>Is the AMS software (or some similar system) available as freeware or 
>shareware somewhere ?  I'm considering the possibilities for anonymized 
>subscription to newsgroups through a mechanism like this. 

AMS is pretty strongly tied to AFS (now known as part of DCE) and is
geared towards sites with users in the thousands.  It's probably not
what you want, even if it were available  (CMU is in the process of
phasing it out, since their user base usage has exceeded the design
limitations of AMS).

>Come to think of it,
>many newsgroups are gatewayed to related mailing lists for readers on BBSes 
>and such; I need to search a bit for the software used to do this.

Take a look at newsgate, available somewhere on ftp.uu.net.  All you
have to do is set up a pseudo-site in your news server's newsfeeds file
and send the messages through news2mail.

>I'm curious how such systems deal with cancellation messages; presumably they
>would simply have to drop them. This would partially eliminate the threat of
>spam-of-cancels attacks I mentioned earlier.

It totally depends upon the configuration of the gateway and the format
of the message.  If your gateway passes Control: headers, then cancels
will be forwarded to the user and perhaps even be effective if they
have another mail-to-news gateway up (that allows Control: headers).
Even more so for cancels of the "Subject: cmsg cancel" format, since
everything passes Subject: headers.
- -- 
Todd Masco     | It's difficult to be loud about keeping your enumerated
cactus@hks.net | rights when you're busy exercising your unenumerated ones.
cactus@bb.com  |        http://www.hks.net/~cactus/cactus.html
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