From: Bryan Reece <reece@taz.nceye.net>
To: EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU
Message Hash: caa42cdaade0c62fc7bff1ed62097ba05f918d6037f2a046f2baefa3b439cf9a
Message ID: <199702180512.VAA23671@toad.com>
Reply To: N/A
UTC Datetime: 1997-02-18 05:12:01 UTC
Raw Date: Mon, 17 Feb 1997 21:12:01 -0800 (PST)
From: Bryan Reece <reece@taz.nceye.net>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 1997 21:12:01 -0800 (PST)
To: EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU
Subject: Re: Anyone have the complete info on CP list alternatives?
Message-ID: <199702180512.VAA23671@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 1997 22:55 EDT
From: "E. Allen Smith" <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU>
Well, Lance Cottrell would appear to be a good person to ask
on this matter, but...
>I just set up a recipe for using mail2news gateways like this:
>:0 c
>| formail -I "Newsgroups: alt.cypherpunks,misc.misc" | \
> sendmail mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu mail2news@utopia.hacktic.nl
>Any objections?
given that mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu gets one of its USENET feeds via
cyberpass.net, it would appear to be unnecessary if this recipe is in
use. However, I do have one problem with this recipe: lack of
loop prevention if a news2mail gateway is going in the other direction.
All the mailing-list hosts are supposed to check for duplicates before
forwarding anything, so this shouldn't do anything worse than have a
few extra copies of each post get discarded, loading the network and
the hosts a bit more. But posting the list to a widely-distributed
newsgroup seems wrong for noise (both to the list itself and to
posters) and delay reasons.
(I've crossposted this message to the remailer-operators
mailing list to make sure it gets to the operators of the gateways in
question.)
In regards to your later query about whether people want their postings
going to Usenet, might I suggest that this be individual to the given
distributed mailing list? In other words, since the recipe is logically
going to have to not forward to a gateway messages from other mailing
lists (since it's not a good idea to have multiple copies of the same
message arriving at the gateway if it can be helped; better to filter
it out beforehand),
It doesn't seem an especially bad idea, since it
some of the mailing lists can forward and the
others cannot. (One could even determine this behavior on application
of the proper X-header, although I never trust various mailing systems
to forward such intact.) The same could also be done with gatewaying
_from_ Usenet - if the news2mail gateway feeds to whatever individual
lists sign up to it and they _don't_ forward such messages to others,
people can decide whether or not to receive Usenet postings on
alt.cypherpunks.* by which list they subscribe to.
-Allen
P.S. A thank you to Reece for setting up a gateway; I had looked
at the program and did _not_ much like the idea of having to
maintain it on my limited knowledge of C/C++ and mailing
software.
The code currently running is a perl script that turns typical email
messages into something INN is happy with. It is probably possible to
get your message rejected by INN if you put obsolete or otherwise
unusual and illegal headers in. This may be a bug.
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1997-02-18 (Mon, 17 Feb 1997 21:12:01 -0800 (PST)) - Re: Anyone have the complete info on CP list alternatives? - Bryan Reece <reece@taz.nceye.net>