Retroactively cross-posting articles

Kenichi Okada okada at opaopa.org
Sun Apr 7 09:00:55 UTC 2002


In the message <m37knkdixv.fsf at quimbies.gnus.org>
Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi at gnus.org> wrote:

> >> What are typical values for -c?
> >
> > I do not know typical values.
> > I use -c 30 on my mail2news server.

> In your experience, that's enough to catch messages cross-posted to
> several mailing lists?

No.
The -c option is not a perfect solution.
If the second mail is delivered after -c seconds, it is not
cross posted.
The -c option can not bear a severe use.

> If I understand correctly, -c will make mailpost sleep for that
> time.  Gmane receives quite a lot of messages, and I'm a bit wary of
> "blocking" the mail delivery system in this manner.   Could run out
> of processes very easily...

I think the "blocking" does not happen.
The mailpost process finishes always for -c seconds.
If there is the second mail cross-posted, the first mail is
not posted and is transfered to the mailpost of the second mail.
The max delay time is (-c seconds) x (cross-posted number).

Another way is to use cistron-m2n at
ftp://ftp.cistron.nl/pub/people/miquels/software/ .
(I have never used it :)

> Perhaps a different approach would be to spool messages, and then
> have a cron job go over them every 30 seconds and do the cross-post
> checking thing.  On the other hand, waiting for half a minute to
> deliver mail doesn't really appeal to me; I want stuff to be
> delivered immediately.  :-)

It is difficult to be delivered immediately.
If you know addresses of all mailing list, you can parse
fields 'To' and 'Cc' of the first mail and create merged Newsgroups.

> So, back to my original question -- would it be possible to hack up
> something to retroactively cross-post an article, or would that just
> break down all the invariants in inn?

That kind of API is not provided. We cannot modify a message
posted already. The APi is not useful on the NNTP,
because the message may be fed to other servers which
do not receive any articles having the same Message-ID.

-- 
Kenichi Okada
mailto:okada at opaopa.org


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