🚀 go-pugleaf

MIKEHOLLOWAY <Holloway@cris.com> writes:

> It would be too confusing for my users to change newgroup names now.
> The bit.listserv name also functions as an identifier for a gated
> newsgroup.

The problem is who holds the keys to the bit.listserv.* hierarchy in terms
of removing groups, creating new groups, changing moderation status, and
so forth.  I don't know what American University's transition plans are.

Fair enough, certainly; I personally intend to move my group to mod.* when
it gets started (finally).

> If your script just needs some custumization of path statements it
> should be something that even I could handle.

It needs Perl 5.003, libnet, and the ability to install Perl modules; if
you have all of that, I should be able to hand you something really
generic for gating mail to a newsgroup, although I don't have something on
hand right away (I have stuff that I use, but it's more customized and not
quite generic enough).

> A roll your own gateway presupposes that the newsgroup is set for
> moderation, doesn't it, or the transfer from newsgroup to mail list
> doesn't work.  Posted messages have to be mailed to the server, as well
> as approved for posting.

The preferred way to handle it is to set the moderation address of the
newsgroup to point to either the list itself (if you want easy posting) or
to the list owner (if you want to check everything first and approve
things manually).  Then the mail to news gateway is subscribed to the
mailing list and everything that goes through the list shows up in the
newsgroup.

Provided the newsgroup is moderated, this works wonderfully.

> I've received a reply to my question in another newsgroup, but it
> answers only the mail to news side of the question, and not vice versa:

> From: "Sam" <sam-000@usa.net>
> [1] Re: Mail to news gateway help?
> Followup-To: cnc.inet                     

> All you need to do is to glue on a Newsgroups: header, and mail it to a
> mail2news gateway.  The two that I use are:

With all due respect to Sam, I consider this to be extremely poor advice.
For one thing, you're relying on notoriously flaky general mail to news
gateways to maintain the gating of your list when it's easy enough to just
do it yourself, and for another you want to do a lot more rewriting of the
messages than that before you send them along to the newsgroup.

I also don't believe this deals correctly with moderated groups.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>