🚀 go-pugleaf

(Note: this is crossposted to four newsgroups.)

Some suggestions to the problems I have found with the Bitnet listserv -
usenet gateways:

Would it be possible to modify those gatewaying softwares between listserv's
& usenet news so that they would add some additional fields to headers of
articles (especially to those one going from mailing lists to news)
telling the readers that the message has come via gateway from mailing list,
and whether the gateway is one- or bidirectional, and how the behaviour
of the reply and follow-up commands has changed?

For example, with a case of newsgroup sci.lang.japan and mailing list
NIHONGO@MITVMA.BITNET (or MITVMA.MIT.EDU), (which, for my understanding,
is gatewayed unidirectionally from mailing list to news), it often
happens that people in Usenet read gatewayed articles from NIHONGO list,
follow-up to them, and alas, the intended recipient never sees them!

And even with bidirectional gateways people often send their private
replies with reply command, and when Reply-To: field has been set
to _mailing list address_, they will be instead distributed as public.
  Consider for example what happened on list TPS-L/newsgroup
talk.politics.soviet some months ago: One person via TPS-L informed
that he has a list of Russian jokes, and he is willing to send them
via mail to any interested person. As a result, there was myriad
articles in talk.politics.soviet with one line contents like "Me too!",
etc. I.e. people have used the reply command without bothering to check
the actual destination address put into the mail header.

So maybe it would better idea to put the poster's original address into
Reply-To: field, instead of mailing list's address, at least if the
gateway is bidirectional? Or add one additional field, e.g. Original-Sender,
or something like that.

Of course it's possible to set the newsreader's options so that
it's easy to see whether article has come via gateway or not.
For example, I have the following line in my .cshrc for rn:

setenv RNINIT '+hAppr +hPath +hSender +hReply-To'

specifying that Approved, Path, Sender and Reply-To fields are shown.
  But by _default_, they are _not_ shown, and I don't know how well
your average news user knows how to hack these things, and so it's
often pretty hard to see whether the article has come via gateway or not.

So I suggest something like this:

X-header: This article has come via unidirectional gateway from XXX mailing
list. If you want to followup to this so that author sees the follow-up,
use r command instead of f. If you want to reply privately, use r command
and change the To: field to contain the following address:
Original-Sender: John.Doe@foo.bar

Well, maybe that is a little bit too long, and the fields could have some
other names, but you get the idea.

Yours,

-- 
Antti Karttunen   <>   karttu@mits.mdata.fi   <>   Mopsi s|i mopin!