From: loki@obscura.com (Lance Cottrell)
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 95 11:35:04 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Mixmaster posting poll
Message-ID: <ac7cd3c3030210044820@[137.110.24.250]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


I think that I am not being clear enough about what I want to do.

Back when I started running remailers, I was using a machine with no local
news software at all. Rather than compile a bunch of software just to allow
the "Anon-Post-To:" command to work, I hacked the scripts to automatically
send those messages to a mail2news gateway. Mixmaster now has a similar built
in anonymous posting ability. If you have inews on your machine, then Mixmaster
can build the "Newsgroups:" header and send the message to inews.
But what if you are running Mixmaster and you don't have inews but you want
to support posting? The answer is to have Mixmaster put together a message
to send to a mail2news gateway for it to post.

When I look at the currently available public mail2news gateways, I see that
two standards already exist. The first is the group.name@gateway.
The other is mail2news@gateway with a "Newsgroups:" header.

It is easy for me to have mixmaster take the request for anonymous posting,
and build the appropriate message for whichever kind of gateway I want to use.

I only want to support one of them. The question is, which one should I
support? Which are there more of. Which are there likely to be more of in the
future.

I seem to recall that someone on this list wrote some mail2news software,
Who was it and which standard did it follow (if either). Has anyone installed
it? Is anyone else planning to install it. I will install a gateway when I
get my T1 (in a couple of months).


        -Lance

At 8:35 AM 9/13/95, Rich Salz wrote:
>>       If the form alt.usenet.group@remailer.com was used, wouldn't the
>> system running the remailer have to have an alias defined for each and
>> every newsgroup that it plans on handling?
>
>No.  Sites running sendmail, for example, could set up rules that
>just knew the top-level hierarchies and fed those into a special
>"mailer" that gatewayed them.
>
>My opinion is that making any names well-known is a bad idea, and
>that attaching special semantics to "mail2news@xxx" is a real bad
>idea.  Instead, just send the message to the specified recipient
>and let do whatever magic needs to be done.
>
>If mixmaster wants to function as a mail/news gateway, it should
>do something special when it sees the Newsgroups header -- process
>the message and feed it into rnews, presumably.
>
>I guess, but not yet having read the code do not know, that this is
>cleaner and more easily extensible (or removable).
>        /r$

----------------------------------------------------------
Lance Cottrell   loki@obscura.com
PGP 2.6 key available by finger or server.
Mixmaster, the next generation remailer, is now available!
http://obscura.com/~loki/Welcome.html or FTP to obscura.com

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra.  Suddenly
it flips over, pinning you underneath.  At night the ice
weasels come."
                        --Nietzsche
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