Re: newsgroup of all mailing lists ?

jones (little.jones.family@ntlworld.com)
Wed, 26 Sep 2001 23:58:27 +0100


dear Matti Aarnio

I was aware of some of the problems with email<->news and thought it iky.
so its interesting to see the innards of the reason why. what I wanted was a
one way sort of thing I did not want to post just read.

I am sure that many people would like to see the mailing list in newsgroup
form (again I emphasize reading not writing) so maybe creating a central
news server for ISP's would be a good idea, keeping the server for just
ISP's to mirror and only be one way, I think would save some bandwidth maybe
?

again I don't really have a place to point the NTL people
(and I suspect there is no real official one but any decent one way, UK
based, server would do for me)

regards

john jones

> From: Matti Aarnio <matti.aarnio@zmailer.org>
> Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 01:35:22 +0300
> To: jones <little.jones.family@ntlworld.com>
> Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
> Subject: Re: newsgroup of all mailing lists ?
>
> On Wed, Sep 26, 2001 at 07:40:33PM +0100, jones wrote:
>> dear all
>>
>> I would like to know which kind people turn the mailing list into a
>> newsgroup ?
>
> There are several Issues with this.
>
> - News system uses Message-ID header content to detect when
> a message has already gone thru the system, and when not.
> That is, the Message-ID MUST BE UNIQUE for the message to
> be stored into the message spool.
>
> - User posting to multiple lists (e.g. linux-kernel, linux-net
> for an example pair) MAY get sent out in single SMTP transfer
> all the way to vger.kernel.org ( except when the user's system
> uses braindead systems splitting things in transfer - like is
> the habit of qmail ...). The message WILL get split into
> multiple deliveries when it goes via Majordomo to each separate
> destination list. Both messages have SAME Message-ID value.
> (The Message-ID is supposed to be generated by the posting
> user client.)
>
> - Having any arbitrary email->news gateway now trying to feed
> those two separate messages to news will result in random
> success/failure order (depending of various latencies).
>
> - Things are worse, there are lots of these gw:s around to feed
> lists to news. Those same news servers also often leak the groups
> into the global net, and may poison your local message-id database,
> and hence the local copy feed to spool might fail.
> ( Again timing and propagation delays affect the thing.. )
>
> - Things get even more worse; some want to have bi-directional
> gateway in between the email and the news. Those are full
> nightmares in broad daylight...
>
>
> It is not trivial.
>
> We ( postmaster@vger.kernel.org ) don't recommend making bidirectional
> gateways -- one mistake there, and the system causes duplication of
> messages at the list it is linked with. When we detect that mistake,
> the usual court-martial is swift, and feed from VGER to the GW is
> removed instantly.
>
> I think these loop problems were one of the reasons why one of us
> (DaveM) strongly opposes list<->news gateways. I am somewhat less
> in opposition, and my thinking is that the only way we can have
> reliable (hah!) list<->news gw is by running it centralized at VGER.
> Modern VGER has muscle for it, but don't expect it to happen any
> time soon.
>
> There were other problems too -- completely clueless people asking
> clueless questions at linux-kernel group. Where cluefull place
> for most of those would have been linux-newbie ...
>
> We try to keep some decent Signal to Noise ratio here.
>
>
> Using a email->news gw script, and keeping the destination group
> in local area (local spool) will work usually. Creating brand new
> Message-ID:s at email->news injection in form which consists of
> e.g. local list-specific prefix catenated with original message-id
> string.
>
>
> I will attempt to schedule posting this text into vger's web for
> the curious, plus add sample email->news injector doing this
> message-id conversion.
>
>
>> this would enable me to read at my leisure and not have my inbox overflow.
>> I am connected to NTL (UK) the same as I believe Mr. A Cox, but I can not
>> find a working newsgroup the NTL administrator has asked me for details and
>> I am afraid I don't know (hence this mail).
>>
>> can someone give me some advice ?
>>
>> regards
>>
>> john jones
>>
>> p.s. I am not subscribed to the list so can you CC me or the list whichever
>> is appropriate
>>
>> p.p.s. I am interested in other lists such as linux-mips and not just the
>> core linux M.L.
>
>
> /Matti Aarnio

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