mail<->news gateway

[Fergus Henderson]

Hi,

Regarding Tyson's mail:

I spend quite a bit of time investigating the possibility of a mail<->news
gateway.  I posted the following mesage to the moderators mailing list.

>    We have a local newsgroup and mailing list here, and I want to connect
>    them with a bidirectional gateway, so that anything posted to the
>    newsgroup goes to the mailing list and vice versa.
> 
>    My plan for the news->mail gateway is to make the newsgroup moderated,
>    with the mailing list as the moderation address.  My plan for the
>    mail->news gateway is to use my existing email filter to accumulate
>    messages in a file, and then have a cron script that takes the messages
>    from the file, adds "Approved:" headers, and posts them to the newsgroup.
> 
>    Questions:
>    (a) Is this all feasible?  Does anyone with experience
>        in this sort of thing have any general suggestions?
>    (b) Does anyone have any scripts for this sort of thing that I can
>        borrow?
>    (c) Is there a better forum for this sort of question?

I got the following reply:

> I suggest you get Rich Salz's newsgate software.
> 
> Ask archie to find 
> 	newsgate.tar.Z
> or	newsgate.tar.gz

but after a fair bit of investigation I think that this software is not
useful to us.

I've asked amb to make cs.mercury moderated with mercury-developers
as the moderation address.  That will solve the news->mail gateway and
archiving problems.  I have a script (~fjh/bin/scripts/mdev-submit)
for the mail->news gateway which will take a mail message, add the
appropriate headers, and post it, but as yet I have no way of invoking
it automatically for each message (obvious solution would be to add
a new user, subscribe that user to the mercury-developers list,
and put the script in that user's .forward file -- but that requires
root permission), or getting it do work around the problems with news
being flakey (I see no easy solution here).

I don't have the time to do any more work on the mail->news gateway.
Either we can all use the mailing list, or someone else (i.e. someone
who cares) will need to do what remains.

Cheers,
	Fergus.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>   |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>   |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3         |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.