Re: newsgroup of all mailing lists ?

[jones]

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 <[e-mail]>
> Date:     Thu, 27 Sep 2001 01:35:22 +0300
> To:     jones <[e-mail]>
> Cc:     [e-mail]
> 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 ( [e-mail] ) 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